As a federal employee, thank you for this. This articulates my general mindset since this fiasco started, but it really helps with my resolve seeing it in writing by a columnist I respect. I'm staying put. #notresigning
Definitely an important point, Dems can't get distracted when Trump goads them into taking the unpopular side of a culture war.
But I maintain, you are in fact allowed to express public dismay when the president's top donor and advisor does a gesture that is either a nazi salute or some other fascist gesture. Musk is actually not a popular person. His approval rating is in the high 30s, and has fallen since the summer. I don't think Dems can build a politics on the back of ferociously attacking billionares, but I think Musk is making himself into an easy target.
"you are in fact allowed to express public dismay when the president's top donor and advisor does a gesture that is either a nazi salute or some other fascist gesture."
It's very hard to make a reasoned, thoughtful cogent argument against chaos and the tearing down of everything. Like "knife to a gun fight" kind of problem. If you pick one thing to focus on, then tomorrow there will be a new outrage. And the kittens will face pressure to chase the laser pointer in a new direction.
There is *so* much bad happening and will happen, that to point to one thing -- e.g., tariffs -- and say *that's* the golden ticket won't work.
I'm not sure what the best strategy is to fight against the agent of chaos, at least until the American people directly the feel pain and are open to the opposition's argument. Until then, probably the best strategy is not to pick one thing but to make the argument about Chaos itself. Just try to paint a picture of Trump and his minions as being out of control and totally corrupt, to be illustrated with examples as appropriate. Just be modest in your expectations about how that will move people, at least until they feel the pain themselves.
The J6 pardons seem like a huge weak point. You point out the main reasoning, and I would add:
-They cannot be reversed.
-Pardonees will be a font of criminal behavior for years and years. One was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop recently, one is facing child pornography charges, and one just went to prison for killing someone while driving drunk.
"J6 rioter pardoned by Trump does [horrible crime]" is a headline that needs to be amplified.
Even inflation was culture war-icized. Suddenly we had inflation because Biden's administration was "teaching girls Ghana about gender ideology" or some other such bs right wing media cooked up.
The voters supposedly cared about inflation and yet voted for 25% tariffs on our two biggest trading partners. Trump and Vance both admitted there would be economic pain. We can't keep letting Trump voters off the hook; they knew what they were voting for and did it anyway, because it would hurt the "right" people. The economy was just a pretext.
I don’t believe the majority of Trump voters had all of the following traits: a) knew what tariffs are, b) believed Trump would implement them, c) believed they would cause pain. This is a classic “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance” situation (not that there aren’t a whole lot of malicious Trump voters).
I don’t care if we are “letting voters off the hook” or adequately punishing them to some standards or other. I care about whether we are making things better, and making bad things like this less likely to happen in the future. If that involves punishing voters, do that, and if that involves flattering voters for their previous bad judgment, then do that. Whatever makes this not happen in future, no matter how distasteful it seems.
Oh they were paying attention just fine. They simply believed themselves to be exempt from the impact of the implementation of Trump's policies. The cost was to be borne by "those people," not MAGA nation. Their rude awakening is going to be a rather long one IMO.
As a normal person it makes me upset and dismayed. As an American whose grandfather came very close to death fighting the Nazis in 1944 Belgium, it makes my blood boil.
However, it's quite clear that Musk calculated this to provoke controversy while leaving enough space for his supporters to pretend there is plausible deniability.
My thought? As much as it hurts, MY is right. Note it, wait, then run ads against the crazier Republicans that show them with Musk and Musk giving the nazi salute. Make them own this.
I watched the salute. I registered it as what it was, and specifically as the crossing of a line that can never be uncrossed. Then I looked at which of my friends, colleagues and trusted news sources acknowledged what I saw, and which ones refused to. It was actually quite liberating -- in the sense that I know who will have my back if things get really bad, and who will be guarding the camps.
To make sure, I watched some footage from a couple of Nuremberg rallies. Having seen Elon's efforts, I have to conclude that if anything, he's been practicing. His angle is basically perfect.
Also, if you want to have plausible deniability about your Nazi salute, it's probably not a good idea to turn 180 degrees and *repeat it.* "No, really, I just did that! Here it is again so you can compare!"
I agree. My most recent Substack post was about how, in the context of the cultural shift toward more pronounced disagreeableness and masculinity, the Democratic party needs to focus on making the argument that Trump is (a) incompetent, and (b) corrupt.
There's no social referee to appeal to any longer. Whether or not he's bigoted (clearly yes, in my opinion), and whether or not what he says or does is offensive and crass (likewise), those things are actually not relevant to whether he is (a) incompetent or (b) corrupt.
The Democratic party has spent too much time appealing to decency, democracy, politeness, egalitarianism--and the culture has shifted to where enough people want to see dynamism and change, and are willing to accept offensiveness and authority as the price that you pay to get greatness.
So it's about demonstrating that Trumpism is not a path to American greatness and not about demonstrating that Trumpism is politically incorrect or low-class. That's a settled question by now, and the answer to that question doesn't have enough political salience with enough people to be germane to future elections.
My strategy is to look at the chaos, and pick the parts that are salient for the people who I know aren't paying attention or who otherwise support MAGA. For example, my parents love Trump, but are also super proud of the small business I started. Letting them know that the trade war with Mexico will hike my cost of goods 20%, and tariffs on Canada will reduce my topline 12% cuts through the noise. No matter what Fox tells them about it, they now have an anecdote that is more salient. Don't get lost in the river of bullshit, channel the chunks floating down where they need to go!
The Fed governors in particular have the added safeguard that if they get fired for political reasons, the markets will (presumably) freak out.
Trump will pay a lower price for firing most officials, so he’ll fire more of them; conversely if he fires or tries to fire the Fed leadership we’re in an especially bad way.
It astounds me that Trumps net approval rating is still positive. The median voter wants the chaos, or at least a few weeks of chaos adjacent political theater.
I believe Biden’s approval rating was solidly in the 50s at the beginning of his presidency. Expect for Trumps to fall, especially if the GOP tries to cut welfare programs.
Basically after the midterms inflation bit and Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan (which was very well orchestrated) solidified the public's negative sentiments towards his administration. The fact he chose to ignore his dismal approval ratings for two years is nuts.
He insisted he could win and keep running for reelection in spite of all the dismal headwinds. He kept up the coalitional appeasement and split the baby act even when his approval rating was in the 30s-40s. The biggest thing I admit in retrospect that his administration did wrong was dismiss inflation concerns with the transitory and focus only on jobs numbers (I was guilty of this attitude too.)
It took an unprecedented and massive collective effort for him to slowly and reluctantly acknowledge that he did not have the ability to run for reelection. And he still insists that he could have beat Trump again. He basically threw a temper tantrum during the lame duck and did silly things like declare a new constitutional amendment ratified.
The Democratic Party is in a terrible position in terms of popularity and public perception now.
I wonder whether the public would have been ok with the inflation if we had just kept interest rates low and let prices rise commensurately. We’ll never know, but the US economy, with its high rates of homeownership and widespread availability of credit cards, is really evolved for a cheap money world. Everyone feels trapped in their house if they were lucky enough to buy or refinance before COVID, and everyone else feels priced out.
And woe to those who had significant variable interest debt, which is a lot of people.
Could we have managed inflation without raising rates - managed meaning settling at higher prices than the counterfactual, but not hyperinflation? I understand that rates now are historically low, but only seniors remember that history, and for what it’s worth houses were a lot cheaper back in those days even in inflation-adjusted terms.
Also, why isn’t there a way to transfer my existing mortgage to a different property? It seems like a no-brainer for the government/Fannie Mae to create and promote this kind of product to make the housing market more liquid.
He didn't listen to MattY. He let the flood of "asylum" seekers continue until 6 months before the election. He didn't pivot to the supply side of the economy to improve the cost of living.
Wouldn’t we want to ask the question the other way? In that two years, what actions did he take that showed he was mindful of his low approval rating and wanted to change it?
I genuinely have serious doubts his approval rating will remain this high; especially if these tariffs remain in place for any length of time.
Biden’s approval rating was well above 50% through the summer of 2021 remember. Lots of swing voters who maybe tepidly voted for him this time because of inflation are unlikely to just change their mind immediately. Human psychology doesn’t work that way.
I’d also take a look at polling of the particular actions he’s take. Pardoning the J6 insurrectionists was not actually popular.
Here's an anecdote about a Trump-voting police officer who's already out protesting over the January 6 pardons. But yes, for most people, there will be more latency.
I understand that people are cross-pressured and can convince themselves that the worst won't happen and it's good that the scales are falling from this guy's eyes . . . but my god.
The median voter has no idea that so and so DOJ official quit or Elon has such and such federal payment system, most of the normal people I know just put their heads down after inauguration day and went back to life
And, also, Fed governors are in a great position relative to a more junior official who needs to resign simply because being fired out of the blue may leave them unemployed for a long stretch, whereas resignation is presumably planned in advance and gives them time to get on the job market. I am certain any Fed governor would have little difficulty securing well-compensated employment.
I had a couple beers on Friday night with my sole conservative friend. We actually had a pretty good time, other than his singing of a song he wrote called "Daddy Sold Trump Flags," which was sung to the tune of a John Prine song (don't remember which) and had a sort of folksy wholesomeness totally disconnected to the reality of the Trump movement. As he was walking out of the bar, he yelled "The king is back!" after I made a crack about Trump's tiny hands.
Last night I talked to my sister who works at the EPA. She said she had a good weekend but was dreading going back to work. Even when she can mentally prepare herself, there's always someone else at work who's not holding it together very well, and there are plenty of good young people that are on probation because they haven't worked there long enough, and they're likely gone. She's going to stick it out like Matt suggests and make them fire her, but she expects a lot of unpleasantness, and it's draining to work somewhere where you've only had excellent performance reviews, and yet they're going to cut you anyway because of an undeserved civil purge.
I had to delete my friend's number after speaking to her. I can't really reconcile being friends with someone who doesn't give a shit that my sister and a lot of good people are going to lose their jobs because Trump is giving him the cultural war victories he craves. I want to add that he's expecting his fifth kid, and his time consuming work in window repair is unlikely to keep his family at a very high living standard. When the Trump tariffs wreck the economy, he's going to feel it, but I'm not sure if he'll ever abandon the man who's hurting the people he wants to hurt.
You should let him know. Not in a jerky way. But in a respectful tone, while making clear that you're still friends, tell him that you can't hang out with someone who is celebrating harm to your family. He thinks politics is just trash talk but it's actually serious business that affects real people's lives, and he should know that.
“it's draining to work somewhere where you've only had excellent performance reviews, and yet they're going to cut you anyway”
Nobody in the private sector can expect that their job is secure regardless of how good their individual performance is; if their company or industry falls on hard times, their individual performance matters for nothing. Good performers will usually find jobs elsewhere, but the only thing that’s sure is constant change.
I get there are jobs we want insulated from petty politicization, but if the mindset of a whole organization is taken over by people resistant to change, sometimes it takes drastic measures to shake that up. It’s not necessarily pleasant for the individuals involved, just as building new housing isn’t necessarily great for the people who live in a given neighborhood right now, but might be preferable for the greater good.
In reading about these attempts to reform and update how the federal government works, and the opposition to it, I keep thinking of that kind of schlocky self-book that was popular in the early 2000s, “Who Moved My Cheese?”.
"but if the mindset of a whole organization is taken over by people resistant to change, sometimes it takes drastic measures to shake that up."
Is that what's going on? Or is the Federal bureaucracy being purged so that Trump can install sycophants who'll do whatever he asks and undermine the rule of law? How would a bunch of partisan yes-men be "preferable for the greater good." I don't know if you're aware, but I haven't seen Trump do anything for the greater good in his entire life.
You can try to rationalize it as much as you like, but he's consolidating the power of the executive branch. I also appreciate your lack of empathy for thousands of Federal employees. Sure, nobody has a guaranteed job in the private sector, but the government sure as hell shouldn't be run as a business.
On this very comment board, I’ve heard repeatedly complaints about how sclerotic and dumber the federal government’s personnel management practices are, for example how hard it is hire people. I’ve also seen for myself examples of federal agencies acting in inefficient ways that prioritize their own convenience without any apparent thought or accountability for the significant larger costs they are imposing externally on everyone else.
The last time I remember Democrats seriously talking about addressing this was Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative which ended up being mostly theoretical.
If people who care about good government and policy won’t address this, somebody else will.
Trump turning this sentiment to the end of conducting a political purge and installing a bunch of corrupt sycophants, instead of actually improving state capacity, risks discrediting the idea that there's really something broken here.
First, the Democrats will just undo all of it the next time they take power, instead of being forced to swallow genuine reforms, which they dislike, because the reforms turned out to work.
Second, no future Republican president is going to want to grasp this issue if this attempt created enough unpopular chaos to lose '26 and '28.
Absent an epochal realignment, the right wielding a hammer on bureaucratic sclerosis simply will not be durable, and will preclude the possibility of anyone trying to wield a scalpel.
So what is the actual course of action to take here? If none of the actors involved have any interest in reforming the system how do you actually reform it?
If no one is interested in reforming the system, it will not be reformed.
You could try to build a political coalition yourself for specific, concrete reforms, as Matt has been trying to do re housing policy for the past 20 years. You know, the slow boring of hard boards and all that.
I am going to buy assets or shares of assets I expect to increase in value because regulatory sclerosis makes it impossible to build or make enough of them to insulate my family's finances from the damage, and vote for whomever seems more likely to try to fix the problem.
If a CEO of a private company sent a directive to all employees putting in jeopardy their future position, department and company without a replacement direction or a plan while at the same time violating laws of a publicly traded corporation the board of directors would fire him in a heart beat even if they had just appointed him. Such comparisons to private business ought to have some basis in reality.
If governments payments for aid and grants aren’t transparent somebody will make them transparent. It should be government officials. The fact that it isn’t is also a failure of government.
A lot of people project their own lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of how to fill that gap with random cultural osmosis from movies or something.
True but I don’t think that’s really in dispute. The converse is also true, and in this case does seem to be in dispute: the fact that a particular proposed solution will not make things better does not prove that no problem exists.
But that's the problem with the whole administrative state. The executive has WAY too much power to make up it's own rules and regulations.
I would love to see SCOTUS gut the administrative state. Congress doesn't have to jot every I and T, but laws need to be pretty detailed and bureaucrats shouldn't be empowered to make major changes to the country. Congress needs to.
The administrative state gives the executive too much power. Let's solve this problem by letting the executive ignore laws governing the administrative state. Brilliant analysis.
I think the part of the administrative state that makes regs & rules should report to Congress and not the president. But that is a separate issue entirely from what Trump is doing.
Spending is not at the discretion of the president. The TikTok ban had no ability for him to delay it the way that he did. He's been granting people in DOGE access to information requiring security clearance without them having gone through the required steps to gain it. I could go on, but if you are not convinced, you are not going to be.
Yes, normally presidents act to install people who will obfuscate and resist them at every turn. Trump is certainly overturning the status quo in this regard.
Perhaps the question should be asked why is there such obfuscation and resistance to this particular president. Why should the president's motives go unquestioned here, especially when we already have a pretty good idea of what's driving them.
I feel this is exactly the sort of false justifications that we don't need to excuse criminal conduct.
1) There is no excuse for breaking the law. New CEOs coming in to turn around struggling businesses do not get to break the law.
2) Trump didn't just not run on much of what is now happening, he explicitly disavowed it (Project 2025). I'd be amazed if you can show me anyone talking about anything like "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" from the campaign.
3) I think you've also caricatured the dynamism of the private sector. Many people work for private sector companies that are themselves fairly sclerotic bureaucracies. They don't employ millions, but they do employ tens or hundreds of thousands. Such organisations do evolve but they very, very rarely disappear. Even when the go bust, which is rare, the government often bails them out.
Plus the USAID stuff from Musk appears to be the result of him following a neo-fascist influencer on social media who accuses USAID of controlling the CIA.
I'm all for making efficiencies. The federal government shouldn't waste one penny. But Musk is jiving us into believing there's some kind of government waste and inefficiency "crisis" that justifies extreme measures. This seems wrong. In sheer fiscal terms, we all know what is driving excessive borrowing: insufficient revenues+retirement and healthcare programs+interest on the debt. (The military spends a pretty penny, too, but its share of GDP has been modest or declining for decades, so...).
The point is, the nuts-and-bolts bureaucratic part of the federal government doesn't seem particularly wasteful, in sheer financial terms. Federal non-military employment peaked in 1990, and is now something like 20% smaller, despite the fact that our population and GDP are much larger thirty-five years on. Also, if you've been following the "international competitiveness" discourse, you'll know the US economy has been leaving the rest of the rich world in the dust over the last half decade. We have our problems, but they don't seem to be related to a "crisis of government bloat." (Indeed, the United States has a modest-sized government by rich world standards.)
Musk is trying to bullshit the country into greenlighting a profound restructuring of our government.
It's not about being at risk of losing your job. It's about being terrorized by fanatic true believers who hold that you are a corrupt member of the Deep State and an enemy of The People.
It's more like being in the private sector and your boss being a racist who sexually harasses you. Sure, you can quit and get another job, maybe in another town, losing all your friends. But does that make it okay?
If you think these guys are intent on making government better, well, all I can say is . . . actually there's nothing I can say to you.
Or if you had a new CEO at a paper company who turned out to believe that the marketing department was part of Pizzagate or something and tried to purge it because of something he saw on Twitter.
"Nobody in the private sector can expect that their job is secure regardless of how good their individual performance is; if their company or industry falls on hard times, their individual performance matters for nothing."
Noting that what outraged federal workers are complaining about is standard treatment in at-will employment in the private sector is simultaneously two things-
1. Also my knee-jerk response, "boo-hoo, your employment isn't 100% secure, poor baby, welcome to the real world that most of the country lives in, buck up buttercup." It's annoying to hear people who generally have very good job security complain about being subjected to the same whims that most American workers are subject to.
2. A great way of dividing people who should have a shared interest in a labor-friendly environment. Getting private sector workers to go "haha not so special anymore" to government workers is crab bucket mentality - celebrating everyone being dragged down to the same unpredictable and exploitable level rather than trying to lift more workers up to a place where they have a more stable work situation.
Normal at-will workers generally aren't fired in political purges every 4 years. There are legitimate policy reasons to think the civil service should not be upended every 4 years when a political transition happens. This is a separate and distinct question from whether it should be easier to fire civil service workers for performance or cause.
I would also be curious if there is any private sector equivalent to a CEO saying something like this to their workforce. From Vought:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
This personally does not seem like a particularly effective strategy for motivating employee performance to me. I think it's pretty easy to imagine scenarios where layoffs or other changes to a workforce might need to occur, but I don't think there is anywhere in the private sector where the teleological end is the destruction of the workforce itself.
"Normal at-will workers generally aren't fired in political purges every 4 years"
No, they're fired in layoffs instead.
What I'm talking about here is not what chaotic mass firings does to the civil service - nothing good! shouldn't do it! - instead I'm talking about the framing of individual workers who thought they had job security finding themselves unemployed through no fault of their own as the victims of some unique evil that only Trump and his cronies would dare visit upon someone.
And yes, the C-suite in the private sector will absolutely dump on their employees - look at the excitement about how AI agents can replace humans while also not asking for pesky things like overtime or holidays. People complaining about the mass offer of resignation for a generous severance package apparently haven't heard that in the private sector, they'll just fire you on a Zoom call instead and leave you to file for unemployment.
And this is bad! In the longer term no one should be treated like this, we should all have some kind of job security and protection against getting canned because leadership messed up. But in the short term, today, it is kind of annoying to hear federal workers complain that they're being treated like most private sector workers.
Yes, this. It is worth remembering that it was the real-world issues generated by the crappiness of political "accountability" via the spoils system (with the cherry on top being the assassination of Garfield by a deranged disappointed office-seeker) that led us to the Pendleton Act and the creation of the civil service in the first place. Not every governmental arrangement that has been around for a long time is stupid or evil just because a ketamine-addled robber baron says so, and amnesia around the fact that such arrangements were created to alleviate problems - and in some circumstances, human suffering - the alleviation of which modern civilized countries have generally decided is the government's job - is no excuse for "move-fast/break-things" idiocy.
"For federal workers whose highest level of education was a master’s degree or more, the cost of total compensation (the sum of wages and benefits) was less, on average, than the cost for their counterparts in the private sector. For workers with less education, the government spent more on total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics...By 2022, federal compensation had declined relative to private-sector compensation, primarily because lawmakers enacted across-the-board salary increases for federal employees that were smaller than wage growth in the private sector."
The fact that people without a security clearance got access to the entirety of Treasury transaction files is simply more important than anything you've mentioned. The entirety of our security clearance process exists to prevent things like this.
I can agree on a practical and personal level, but it might still all be on the up and up? I'm not sure about the nuances regarding how Trump can grant clearance to people. Hopefully there are sharp legal minds looking into, and where appropriate contesting, these things.
DEI sucks up more resources than it should. Removing it allows better focus on other things, ergo, potentially better services and certainly better targeted. Successful execution, of course, remains to be seen.
Your sister doesn't 'deserve' her job. Civil servants serve under the terms which, and as long as, the State, installed by the people or their representatives, requires. That's the nature of government. If she wants a position inured from any kind of political shifts, she should find a position which does not use tax dollars to fund her salary.
You can't keep bureaucrats in jobs just because it causes them personal hardship and unhappiness to not have that job, but I understand that you are simply being emotional and I understand that.
Let’s not talk about what one “can” or “can’t” do. Let’s talk about what one *should* do. It’s true that we shouldn’t keep people in jobs just because they’d be unhappy if they lost their job. But equally, we shouldn’t remove people from jobs just because they’d be unhappy if they lost their job.
Deciding whether or not someone should keep their job should be based on whether they are doing their job well and whether it should be done. It doesn’t seem like either of those is a consideration here.
The main thing is that whatever your view is of whether the jobs should be done, the answer should be determined through changing laws - statutes, regulations, etc. - not by the President (or Elon Musk acting as his valet) simply deciding. Yes elected officials have the authority to take action on things by virtue of having been elected, but their authority is defined and limited by law because that's how our system of government works. We don't elect people to have dictatorial powers for the duration of their terms. A democracy that does that isn't going to be a democracy for long.
Wow, so edgy. You're a very talented trash talker, kudos on that, but I personally don't think that's what this forum is about, nor do I think it adds value.
I mean you said that I, like Trump, personally think the 1880s were America's Golden Age and that I want a spoils system, neither of which have anything to do with my position that State employees serve at the pleasure of the leaders of the State, and it has always been thus.
That is literally what the spoils system is. Maybe you genuinely don't understand that, but if so, then yes my comment to you added value by giving you information you are ignorant of.
It should certainly be easier to fire poor performers (or, more likely, non-performers) for cause, but the wholesale gutting of the administrative state created and empowered by Congress is a bad thing.
There's certainly a good argument to be made that the specific positions being eliminated are badly chosen, but simply 'nobody should have her government job threatened because it makes her feel bad' is not tenable.
Neither is it tenable to say “civil servants *should* have their jobs threatened because it makes them feel bad”, and that seems to be the organizing principle - hate and punishment.
to this point private companies go to considerable lengths to try to assure the remaining employees of their value after layoffs because their morale is even more important after the downsizing. And while there is an understanding that layoffs happen in the private sector private companies generally do try to give employees a level of assurance that increases morale and helps employees make decisions that are in line with the (longer) timetables associated with corporate initiatives. Yes it is true that a corporate employee could be let go at any time. But on the other hand companies offer stock or options on. 3-5 year vesting schedules and employees do not generally consider these useless (because while some of them will not survive to see them vest, many actually will!)
And a company that has horrible morale will have trouble recruiting quality people, risking eventually going out of business. At least then the competitors may be attractive. Meanwhile, if no one smart wants to work at Treasury after this month for a generation, then the country as a whole is worse off. This type of behavior is horrible for getting quality employees into government.
How did you get from the original comment to this? The commenter's phrase "undeserved civil purge" isn't making the case that the civil service get jobs like first amendment rights or anything else.
The original commenter is _I think_ implying that Trump and Musks' attempt to gut the federal workforce isn't something that workforce deserves in the moral sense of just desserts.
Like, if someone had shut down TSA after one of their incidents of luggage theft back in the day we could have an argument about whether getting rid of those employees was justified. Or if this was all part of a large austerity package, then we'd at least have a 'why' that takes the moral question out ("you did nothing to deserve this, but there's no money"). Or if there was a big bribery ring in a field office and the whole office got canned, we'd say "yeah you all deserved that, plus to be prosecuted."
But Musks' hijacking of OPM isn't any of these things - the Trump people have stated multiple times that they believe the rank and file are full of insubordinate leftists. So if you work for the government and aren't an insubordinate leftist and Trump's people take over OPM and try to make your job a living hell, you might go "the hell did I do to deserve this??" and it would have nothing to do with any guarantees of employment.
Did you ever discuss with your friend what your sister's experience has been like? I feel like if you and your friend are/were friends there's a chance for persuasion there.
(FWIW I tried 'having that talk' and it went poorly and I felt quite frustrated later, but I felt like it was important to try.)
"replace the entire government with Heritage Foundation interns"
The Heritage Foundation literally cannot find enough interns with triple-digit IQ's to replace anything.
Barring a complete turnaround of this entire endeavor, I think these first several weeks decisively disprove the notion that the right has the brainpower to fix much of anything.
The left's brainpower may be too wrapped up in persuading itself of unempirical crap and the professional class's in buttering its own bread, so it's possible that the right smashing everything, things that work and things that don't alike, is the *only* way forward to getting rid of the things that don't work... but it'll be a fucking mess.
I don't think they want to "fix" anything the way you're using that term.
I know Musk comes across as some kind of weird techno-futurist with pie-in-the-sky but unworkable ideas, but I suspect that the best way to understand his political ideology is that it's just very old-fashioned "shrink the federal government until we can drown it in a bathtub" Norquist-ism. He isn't the first wealthy businessmen to hit middle age and become enthralled with this worldview. "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
The issue is that due to the accretion of process around our regulatory establishment and its weaponization by, succinctly, the fucking lawyers and NIMBY nutjobs, the government just straight-up *is* the problem in a number of fields of endeavor, most prominently manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and energy.
This isn't to say, in any way, that government regulation of these fields isn't necessary, but to say that the current regulations and processes are *unfit for purpose* in most every way.
- Impossible to build green generation capacity or transmission corridors therefore.
- Wildly expensive and very slow to build transit infrastructure.
- Ruinously expensive for private firms to build advanced manufacturing plants and crippling to international competitiveness to pay the legal and compliance burdens associated with running them.
- Legally difficult to build housing at all and particularly slow when doing in-fill development, such that soft costs raise prices by more than $80k per unit in the median jurisdiction.
If you think the regulatory environment is working then those must be your desired outcomes. Congratulations, the United States will look like Argentina in a few generations.
Whatever, my asset-rich grandkids will have personal servants.
You're describing less than 1% of what the federal government does, and I want those problems to be fixed through legislation and the slow boring of hard boards, not by firing thousands of federal workers who (a) haven't done anything wrong and (b) mostly don't work on these issues. Grover Norquist doesn't pretend to care about any of the issues you highlighted, maybe consider the possibility that his solutions won't help but will actually make things worse.
I am increasingly confident that the death grip the knowledge worker classes have on the Democratic Party's throat cannot be broken. Their goal is to turn everything into compliance so they can extract their share of the pie even if it strangles the underlying physical endeavor, and the vast majority of them have convinced themselves that this is a morally righteous position to hold, that commitment to process is good in and of itself, that the vast amounts of money they earn administering that process improves outcomes despite all evidence to the contrary.
No one in our entire coalition aside from a relative handful of "neolib" commentators and their diehard fans understands or cares about the incredibly obvious degradation of outcomes, virtually all of the other smart people who vote Democrat directly profit from strangling physical endeavors in red tape.
I see not a single, solitary reason to be optimistic that such reforms are even possible for us to enact, let alone coming. Every single solitary "deregulatory" bill out of state legislatures in CA, MA, NY, NJ... contains a host of even more burdensome requirements that ensure no one will ever take advantage of the deregulated outcome.
All I am saying is that it seems more likely that the other side, being dumb as a rock, just destroys the entire regulatory apparatus than that we trim it down in ways that make sense.
Trump, of course, has no commitment to destroying anything, he just wants his own loyalists in charge of it all and to punch people he doesn't like, hence a *regulatory bar* to green power investment.
I don't think those two statements are in conflict at all?
It is easily possible for the government to simultaneously cause very real problems with overregulation and for the correct response to not be "don't regulate anything at all."
The US absolutely doesn't need more "state capacity" to deal appropriately with manufacturing, construction, energy, and agriculture regulation and the attendant cluster of permitting and compliance processes. It needs to vastly simplify many regulations pursuing goals that should be pursued, remove wide swathes of regulations which pursue goals that shouldn't be pursued at all, and reallocate all the personnel involved in enforcement or regulation to other endeavors.
This is one field, possibly the only one, in which there really isn't a state capacity argument to be had, it's just clear and obvious regulatory overreach at every freaking step. It is extraordinarily telling that basically every construction and manufacturing worker on earth hates OSHA.
You want to unfuck healthcare? I agree, state capacity all the way. Defense procurement? State capacity. Infrastructure design costs? State capacity. IT procurement and contracting administration? State capacity.
But NEPA? Drown the whole fucking thing in a bathtub and offer everyone who was involved in administration a transfer or a pink slip. OSHA's rules for manufacturing facilities? Fire all the staff lawyers, contract a bunch of reasonably intelligent blue collar workers and managers who came up from the floor to tell you what's sane and what isn't, trim language and rules accordingly.
The government causing *some* very real problems while preventing others does not sound to me like “the government is *the* problem”. It sounds like “part of the government is *a* problem”, which is very different, and calls for something other than just smashing the government.
I don't disagree with any of this! I just read enough history to disbelieve that gradualism is always possible in the face of very entrenched interests.
Could the Roman Republic have reformed its institutions to lead to stable governance and continued maintenance of the infrastructure and military force which made the Mediterranean a safe place to knit together a large-scale trade network? Sure.
Was it actually possible that the Senate and the Optimates would have done so instead of riding the status quo down in flames? I don't think so. In context, the revolutionary change that came with Caesar's overthrow of the Republic and Octavian's creation of the Principate was possibly the least harmful outcome.
What is desirable and what is possible aren't always the same, and when the possible rules out the perfect and even the good, all that's left is the "least bad."
The libertarian in me hopes that this realization (that the left, the right, and the purely self-interested will always exist and will always have irreconcilable differences) will convince the majority of us that expecting the government to take so much responsibility for so much of our lives does not lead down a good path.
The libertarian in me is dead and buried and will stay that way.
Modern, technological societies are complex as shit and rely on an immense amount of regulation and standards-setting to agglomerate information, otherwise far too much information exists for even large, technologically-proficient, specialized organizations to understand. Without such, information asymmetry problems will overwhelm both societal trust and the orderly functioning of markets and everywhere will look like the Philippines or low-end Latin American countries.
The problem is that even in fields where the government (and, in the US, the non-profit professional organizations and standards-setting bodies) is a large and technologically-capable, it struggles with the amount of information relevant to rule-making and standards-setting. There is not and has not for a long time been enough bandwidth to deal with the steady accretion of outdated rules and standards and accumulation of processes.
I don't see what particular fields the government is taking too much responsibility for, I just demand that the regulations and standards be made to fucking work via an orderly sunset process, regular consolidation and simplification of the language used, curtailments of failed policies like NEPA, and the efficient standardization of processes across teams, departments, and fields of endeavor.
The undead libertarian in me (tempered by the realist in me) points out that, yes, we need some rule-making, mainly to deal with the tragedy of the commons and other externalities (if there *are* other externalities - I'm not sure). But we will simply never have an orderly sunset process, because rule- and law-makers will always think that *this particular* rule or law is too important to sunset. And rules will never be effectively consolidated or simplified, because bureaucracy does not work that way and never has. And failed policies like NEPA are very hard to repeal because there are always entrenched stakeholders and demagogues who stand in the way. And, jeez, if there's far too much information for "large, technologically-proficient, specialized organizations to understand" (organizations that are motivated by profit and hence tend to attract the best and brightest), how do you think a massive government will effectively standardize processes related to this information across teams, departments, and fields of endeavor?
So my undead libertarian says, give up on this fantasy, and minimize (though don't eliminate) the role of the government.
I've lived in places like that and traveled to more still. Whatever problems we have because the state has bloated are wildly more tractable than places where it's too small or its reach exceeds its grasp. You as an individual cannot trust any market transaction because the information asymmetry strangles everything, and social trust is nonexistent, which is corrosive to all endeavors that might durably increase economic complexity and thus standard of living.
I am not confident our problems cannot be solved without smashing a bunch of stuff, for the reasons you state.
But if that happens, I am very, very confident that your libertarian paradise/everyone else's shithole is even more untenable as a steady-state and politics will immediately demand that the state start to do more, and the cycle will begin anew.
Good point regarding Ezra Klein. Pursuing executive action isn't the only thing showing weakness; so is the speed (the "muzzle velocity" in Bannon's phrase). If they were slower, quieter and more insidious, they might be more successful in gutting/transforming the government, as his expert noted. Trying to do everything at once is more likely to spark a massive reaction that will finally stop them in their tracks.
FDR was able to get Congress to rubberstamp almost everything he wanted—he was the most powerful President ever, to a probably scary degree if you weren’t in agreement with his policies (Lincoln’s unique wartime situation aside). Trump isn’t even close; in fact is still living in the world whose creation FDR led, in part because FDR had things written into law by Congress.
It's interesting that Yarvin's whole the-US-needs-a-monarchist uses FDR as his shining example. The Yarvin stuff seems like a lot of hot air but yeah ... it's probably hard to compare our current presidents to FDR's power.
Well, no. Maybe these shouldn't be anyone's "responsibilities" at all, or maybe they should be handled more locally by bureaucrats who are closer to the people they're regulating. I'm not sure what you think I'm envisioning when you say that I'm implying that government responsibilities should be taken over by unaccountable corporate entities.
I know it's a favored right-wing talking point, but do we really need a federal Department of Education?
As I mentioned in another comment, "yes, we need some rule-making, mainly to deal with the tragedy of the commons and other externalities." The Clean Water Act is, in principle, about the best example I can think of, of rule-making to deal with the tragedy of the commons.
I'm trying to think of which services provided by governments were better before they were run by governments. Defense, no. Law enforcement, no. Public works, no. What's first on your list?
"Never doubt that a few harmless flakes acting together can unleash an avalanche of destruction" - seen on an old Demotivation poster, a lot less funny during the last two weeks.
If you want to do anything more complex than Serengeti Hunter-gatherer lifestyle, then *someone* other than yourself needs to take a lot of responsibility for a lot of things. The question is just *which* responsibilities are taken by people who you have input with and which are taken by complex organizations you don’t have input in, regardless of whether those institutions are called “government” or “religion” or “business” or what.
Just at this moment, I got my email notification of the latest Josh Barro post with the title, "President Trump Is Doing Several Things That Strike Me As Unwise."
Oh Josh, never stop being you. So precious.
And did anyone listen to his podcast with the centrists recently? Supposedly about Trump's first week, it was virtually non-stop bashing of the Democrats. What the hell's the matter with these people.
I don't follow Josh Barro or basically anyone in that ideological cluster because I don't think they're serious people, but in my case it boils down to, "I vote Democratic for all federal, most state, and many city offices despite my doubts about their commitment to running the government well, I have earned the right to bitch about that lack of commitment in SB comments."
I cannot fathom how a message of "Do your job faithfully to execute lawful directives from the democratically elected President" can be remotely controversial.
The problem is what is lawful and what is not isn't as clear-cut as it seems. Let's say Trump orders the civil service to do something and there's a lawsuit and it goes to the SC, where they rule 5-4 Trump is right. That means 4 SC judges who have spent their lives studying and interpreting laws think Trump is doing something against the law. If they can come to that conclusion but still disagree with their other 5 colleagues, what hope does your average civil servants have of interpreting whether an order is lawful?
You've described lots of directives from Presidents of both parties spanning decades (centuries?). Trump, I'm sure, will push the envelope more often though.
I think there are three appropriate options:
"I think what you are asking me to do doesn't comply with statute XYZ. We can accomplish your goal some other way".
Or do what they ask and let the lawyers hash it out.
Or resign.
These are the three options *any* employee has when asked to do something of dubious legality, whether in the civil service or in the private sector.
Except civil servants are not like employees in the private sector. Some of them take oaths, and all of them owe a first duty to the Constitution and the law as it is written rather than their employer or management. That empowers them, may even compel them, to choose a fourth option: I am not going to do what you tell me, I am going to do what the law tells me, and I have no duty to resign because this displeases you.
It isn't much different, actually. Private sector employees, as law-abiding citizens, also have an obligation not to break the law. And in the case of large employers often will sign an ethics and compliance statement that affirms their commitment to follow the law.
It is usually not different. The distinction I'm thinking of is that in the private sector do nothing is an alternative to break the law, because private businesses are generally not ordered by law to do a task. Government employees can be faced with a choice of being lawfully compelled to do that which their political masters would not want them to do.
Yes, I was one of the people who defended Kim Davis in the narrow sense that "she should just do her job no matter what" is not a viable principle for people who are sworn to uphold the laws! The problem with Davis was just that she was wrong, not that she chose a form of protest that's invalid.
I disagree. They have civil service protections so they are protected from unfair firings, and to provide each incoming administration with knowledgeable employees who understand the labyrinth of regulations under which they operate. No incoming administration will understand all the nuances. But in return for those protections, the employees have an ethical duty to provide their knowledge in support of the goals set forth by our duly elected leaders.
This applies equally to the Border Patrol if, as reported, they worked to subvert Biden's directives, as it applies to the executive agencies you might be more sympathetic to.
A lot of folks who work in and adjacent to the Federal government do so because they believe in the missions of the organizations they support. This is especially true of folks in leadership roles but short of being political appointees. There a plenty of lawful things that can be asked of these organizations that are orthogonal to or in contradiction of their stated or intended missions.
The EPA is an excellent example. Many folks who joined the EPA do so because they care deeply about the environment. If they're now asked to draft rules that make it much easier to put waste into drinking water (as a hypothetical example), they may become discouraged even if the new rules are lawful.
I think these are the type of folks MY is targeting in this column.
Yes, they're taking that phrase out for a real test drive, aren't they?
Send 21 year old Mr. BigBalls over to Treasury to demand access to all personal payment information and threaten the Treasury folks who dare to push back.
It would help if some Republican members of Congress spoke up and clarified what *they* think is and isn't illegal since it is literally their job to write down what is and isn't a lawful directive.
Absolutely agree - wrote a piece about this a while ago. It's vital that Trump be made to get blood on his hands by actively violating these norms, not to have people "obey in advance" (however cringe that phrase has become) and give him legitimacy.
How can our side come up with and repeat anything message-wise with confidence if we preemptively call it 'cringe' or call it 'cringe' whenever it is not greeted with with 100% all-around acclamation and gets derision and mocking from somewhere [and it always will, from conservative enemy's at the very least; conversely, their TPs, even ones that are on balance effective, are reliably derided/mocked by millions- but they don't care].
Conservatives' political superpower....and perhaps occasional vulnerability....is their very *lack* of a 'cringe' or 'flinch' reflex in their nervous systems.
I mean fair point, I just guess the Slow Boring message board is to me a place to discuss these things frankly. "Obey in advance" is a phrase I associate with a particular aesthetic of commentary and a particular analysis of the situation (e.g. Synder's) that I don't fully dig, but YMMV.
Cuban has been doing good stuff (and has clean hands regarding Docic). He could be a very interesting candidate for President. The conundrum is that if Trump is as big a catastrophe as I fear, that would probably be bad for Cuban's prospects, as it would tend to delegitimize a candidacy based on being a rich, charismatic businessperson. By thermostatic reaction, what the American people might prefer would be a calm, normal, experienced politician (what the promise of Biden was in 2020).
His best chance is if Trump succeeds then? Oy vey.
I mean, resigning in protest does have a long tradition- as a member of said group, i think it'd be better described as "if i don't participate in thing, it'll stop happening".
That being said, yeah, from a tactical perspective, make them fire you, make them make their moves.
The resign in protest model is ages old. It's goal is always to change and or prevent the bad outcome that going along would occur.
Staying and making them fire me for not going along also is ages old. Neither of these ideas are at all left coded. Both are means to an end, not the end themselves.
There was a discussion here a few days back about civic virtue and the concept of honor. Both these actions have long been considered the "honorable" thing to do. Unless you denigrate as just another means of emotional satisfaction, this should be seen as something more serious than that.
I would expect 'Resign in protest' works best when you're asked to do something blatantly illegal/immoral and you resign to call attention to the thing that you expect most people will _agree_ with you is illegal/immoral.
If most of Trump's supporters think "culling the bureaucracy" is a good thing, then you're not calling attention to anything unpopular, you're just making his job easier and potentially giving up a future opportunity to keep things working right.
Yeah, I think resigning in protest works best when you're actually somebody the person you're resigning against likes personally or admires. If you're not, resigning in protest does nothing and probably is even beneficial to your enemy.
Yes, there's nothing wrong in principle with resigning in protest. The question here is just, which tactic under present circumstances will be more effective at preventing or frustrating the wrongful acts that Trump is attempting.
Thank you for articulatng this and sorry I phrased it poorly overall.
I could be very wrong but what I feel and am concerned a little bit these days is resign in protest is associated with "being badass" and receives an applaud or attention and as a result, there's a temptation to go that route even if it's not the best mean to the end.
And I feel likt this is happening more on the left than the right (think it's mostly bc most institution is staffed by highly educated ppl but could be other reasons)
Part of the resign in protest, or threaten to resign in protest, is that it assumes the person in charge is capable of shame or at least being influenced by their public image. This actually happened with Trump, probably more than once, but the easiest for me to remember was in January 2021 when he wanted to put a flunky in charge of DOJ. There was a credible threat of mass resignations, and Trump backed down---ahh the good old days.
I can't emphasize that stock futures being down enormously right now is one of the best things can happen right now. When I'm agreeing with the WSJ editorial board, that should tell us something.
I bring this up because market reaction might the only thing can change us from this really dangerous course. Matt brought him up, but Trump possibly threatening Jay Powell if he doesn't cut rates is a real possibility here. And the only thing I think that could stop him is if the market tanks. He craves the approval of Wall Street titans and they are not going to be best pleased with him if tariffs persist and market tanks.
For all the focus on Musk and lesser extent Bezos and Zuckerburg we can sometimes forget that lots of very powerful and rich people are not part of the "bro"ligarch tent. There are tons of GOP congressmen and senators who represent districts and states that are tremendously harmed by this.
I bring up because I still have to say as loud as I can; GOP officials have agency. What's galling is that they've demonstrated this throughout the Trump era for stuff like tax cuts. They can actually do something about this anytime they want.
The good news is Powell might be unique in not giving any fucks about Trump. I loved his simple "No." answer when asked back in November. I don't think Trump will have any influence on him but also pretty clear the 2026 nomination is going to be a mess and come down to a contentious near party-live vote when Trump nominates some stooge.
Given the amount of fentanyl coming from Canada it's such an easy "victory" for Trump for him to crow 6 months from now about how his "tough" tarrifs has meant little to no fentanyl coming across the border from up north.
All so very stupid. Also another reminder how much of his success is the almost complete supplication of right wing media.
I know we continue to debate why Biden was so unpopular. But can't be emphasized enough how much more criticism him (or any Democrat) will get from other Democrats, left of center media and left wing groups than Trump will no matter what happens.
Being anti-abortion is one of the supposedly most important parts of the GOP policy platform. Trump comes out (at least rhetorically. Different story with various LA and TX AG(s)) as not wanting to further restrict abortion access...and crickets in the right wing press or right wing generally.
The contrast with say Israel-Palestine is just astonishing.
People think we have a two party system. Silly people. We have a three party system: the Republicans, Democrats 1 and Democrats 2. And the fighting is much more vicious between the latter two and their supporters than between them and the first one.
And does anyone really believe Canada is complicit or even indifferent to fentanyl trafficking? If this all effectively ends today with bullshit "concessions" what does it even mean?
You know, when I worked in public health for about a decade, I sat and watched the FDA miss the youth vaping epidemic while touting generational smoking success. I worked with the CDC as they rebranded a painkiller abuse epidemic to an opioid epidemic, but then didn't do anything to solve it and actively pushed the opioid issue to the black market of fentanyl, synthetics, and heroin by cracking down on pill mill drs and then do nothing else. I watched the WH and NIH fuck up the COVID comms so bad that the backlash to taking the vaccine reached over 50%, and was told our media-derived numbers were impossibly high and not real.
I've said before there needs to be a US wide, public CDP of sorts to help with program and agency accountability. But more than that our bureaucracy does need to be kicked in the teeth with at least one example of a modern organization. If DOGE can rework even one agency to modern standards that would be enough to start the snowball.
The old saw is that every agency wants to be second to innovation - first is risk, third is late. All you need is one
What you've described points to individual examples of when the federal government should have done a better job, or avoided mistakes. It's not clear how reducing state capacity accomplishes this. Is Musk pressuring people to quit government service only if they're complicit in some gross, harmful public error?
That's not what the papers are reporting. Also, the people most responsible for policy formulation and implementation are generally political appointees, and as such have always been fire-able.
There's quite a lot of brushfire to burn without harming the core trees fruiting value for citizens across our bureaucratic agencies. I understand the 5-alarm fire people are feeling at the unorthodox tactics here (to put it mildly) but the goal is radical cost reform not erasement. I will hold my critiques about diminished state capacity until we see the other side, because in a word, outside defense and intel, what state capacity?
If the question is “what state capacity?” then let’s look at the examples you mentioned. The youth vaping epidemic is clearly a problem, but we have actually been enacting regulations that begin to get a control on it within a decade or so of when it started, quite unlike the original cigarette smoking epidemic. With painkiller abuse and the opioid epidemic, again this is being insufficiently addressed, but still much better than the epidemics of gin in the 1700s of cocaine and heroin in the late 19th century. With vaccine hesitancy, there were many mistakes (some of them intentionally amplified by elected officials) but again, we got a new vaccine within a year, and within a year of its introduction we got higher usage than with the annual flu vaccine.
There are absolutely many problems with state capacity in public health. But if someone *claims* they want to fix them, I would like to see them at least propose something positive, rather than just cut, cut, cut in ways that jeopardize the basic gains we’ve fought so hard for over the past century.
In 2014 when I was working with the FDA and watching the youth vaping rates skyrocket, they were actively celebrating ending youth smoking. Catching it and 'beginning to get a control on it' within a decade of not when it started, but when they classified it as an epidemic is just as large of a miss as COVID. Gen Z was already addicted beyond repair.
The opioid epidemic was functionally made worse by pushing the issue to the black market and out of public health systems, and only is starting to curve downwards because (a) tons of people have died, and (b) producers are struggling to produce high potency like they were doing before. It has nothing to do with US Fed intervention at all, in any way.
Vaping is like a million times better for you than smoking, so that's an unqualified win. You seem like a person with an axe to grind and it's clouding your judgement.
6% of kids age 13-17 use e-cigs. 4% of middle schoolers. We lost a whole decade 2014-2024 until its started to decrease. The FDA did nothing despite getting hundreds of millions of dollars per year to tackle the issue. Similar to opioids they threw up their hands and waited for the issue to resolve itself over a mountain of health issues costing further tens of billions. So yes I am upset at them and have an axe to grind over being personally threatened by the FDAs OIG for calling it out.
>but the goal is radical cost reform not erasement<
Why is "radical" cost reform needed? If we want to save serious cash, we need to look at retirement programs and healthcare. Full stop. That is where the real money is. We have hundreds of thousands *fewer* federal civil servants than we had 35 years ago, and we run a public sector that is one of the smallest in the rich world.
C'mon, these people have been promising a war on the deep state for years now. Well, this is what that war looks like. Don't fall for con.
Sure, but the public sector has been moated with systems integrators who have shielded them from modernization. I was told to my face in 2018-2020 by more than one Fed CIO that despite exec orders, the Fed Gov will never be able to do zero trust and that only big tech can do it. Here we are a few years later, its widely used around the industry, and not a single agency is fully transitioned, and our bureaucratic systems are hacked to kingdom come.
I agree we need civil service protections, but on the other hand we need functional bureaucratic systems. We have neither.
When I worked with HHS on ads campaigns at Google, at any given time there were over two dozen public health campaign running, from HIV/AIDS to Flu to Zika to Opioids etc you name it they run it. The thing is, each department runs their own research program in order to determine target markets. So back in 2014-18 if you were living in Huntington, WV you were a part of every single one of these two dozen ish campaigns target market, not to mention whatever other federal programs were going on. So you would get ads for each which conflicted with each other, then each program would do their own years-long evaluation based on control & exposed experiments, and then come to some conclusion for the next effort.
The people of Huntington saw millions of ads telling them how poor, sick, and needy they were every single day like it was the week before an election. Who knows what came out the other side but every single program was extremely tainted in its analysis based on the innumerable other overlapping efforts targeting the same people.
I answered an IDIQ once recommending to consolidate the first-party data around these initiatives, and then turn around and provide that data back to individual programs so they could do better, be more efficient, and perform more accurate analysis. I never even got down-selected with that approach.
Cancelling half those contracts and consolidating that work would be seen as a large diminishment in civil service work, money spent, and "state capacity" on paper. But the people impacted by each dollar would see far better results with a unified approach.
I've been in orgs that have done radical consolidations and pivots. It's like lighting a brushfire to help growth. Everyone who has worked in tech has seen something similar. Reorgs happen for a reason, and I'll hold my breath before I judge outcomes.
You have some basic facts wrong here, for what it's worth.
"I sat and watched the FDA miss the youth vaping epidemic while touting generational smoking success."
This isn't true. FDA tried to regulate e-cigarettes as soon as they hit the US market, but the courts overruled them due to statutory interpretations at the time.
"I worked with the CDC as they rebranded a painkiller abuse epidemic to an opioid epidemic, but then didn't do anything to solve it and actively pushed the opioid issue to the black market of fentanyl, synthetics, and heroin by cracking down on pill mill drs and then do nothing else."
CDC has no regulatory authority at all with respect to drugs. What are you claiming they should have done sooner to crack down on pill mills or doctors?
"US wide, public CDP" already exists and is pointless, for what it's worth. Everyone ignores it.
The CDC gives moneys and data to states so it's all CDC funds flowed through grants, which were tailored at community listening and response programs and pill mill drs. That was the way the funds were directed.
There is no US wide CDP what are you even referring to? The closest thing is GSAs DAP program which just puts Google analytics on websites and creates once annual PDFs.
CDC had no appropriations to address opioids until 2015. It's not clear to me what you expect them to do to address the issue before they have funding or staff to do anything.
Google the Government Performance Results Act, the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act, and the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. Each agency already has measurable goals.
They lost a case because they narrowly defined their own policies to their own detriment. Youre the case for me! They reversed it themselves in 2016 by changing their own rules. It had to argue that e cigs were medical devices because it had painted itself into its own corner. It had to twist itself into legal knots to get it out it with the Deeming Rule.
The CDC had tons of appropriations, it was just not called the opioid epidemic. I ran $10M+ ad campaigns around painkillers for years prior, it just wasnt centralized because (surprise surprise) no one at CDC had the bright idea to look at the results of their own policies. The news reporter in west virginia who broke the story won a literal pulitzer based on finding that WV had prescribed "780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills." I'll give you one guess as to two major sources where public health authorities could find that information. Hint -- inside their own walls
Lmao on the performance acts. Bidens literal second goal of the PMA was around customer experience, which flopped miserably as they decided they could reinvent the field rather than use tried and true methods....like using a CDP. None of these have even a whiff of CDP or modern personalization tech in them at all. Name a single one. I'll wait.
I'm sorry, but you keep showcasing how you don't have a good handle on the timeline, facts, or policy issues. Let's just stick with e-cigs.
You say FDA missed e-cigs as a public health problem.
This is flatly not true. E-cigs entered the US market in 2006, and FDA immediately began seizing them as unregulated medical devices a few months later. This is consistent with FDA's existing statutory authority at the time and how other countries still continue to regulate e-cigs. Since you claimed FDA dropped the ball on e-cigs, your initial argument is dead at this point; FDA began addressing the issue in months.
"They lost a case because they narrowly defined their own policies to their own detriment. Youre the case for me! They reversed it themselves in 2016 by changing their own rules. It had to argue that e cigs were medical devices because it had painted itself into its own corner. It had to twist itself into legal knots to get it out it with the Deeming Rule."
This is another misread of the policy history here.
In 2009, Congress passes the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This grants new statutory authority to FDA to regulate tobacco and smokeless tobacco products.
E-cigarette companies sue and claim e-cigs should be regulated as tobacco products under the new regulatory pathway created by the 2009 law.
The courts agree in 2010. You claim "FDA painted themselves into a corner," but this can't be true. There was no corner for FDA to paint themselves into until Congress passed the alternative regulatory pathway for tobacco products in 2009. Following the passage of the 2009 law and court rulings, FDA issued regulations that implement the 2009 law. This is what the "Deeming Rule" is. The people at FDA are not stupid for issuing rules after a new law is passed.
The glaring issue here is that you pretend that these (a) worked as intended and (b) worked at all. FDA in the 2000s just wanted to apply the same regulations as cigs, didnt see them as connected to youth, and didnt take them seriously as an issue at all. They did no advertising or public health outreach until well into ~2015-16, when they were actively being criticized by the WSJ and NYT for dropping the ball. This is all easily recorded history. They pushed back on any notion at the time that they had a real issue and the FDA commissioner Hamburg at the time blamed digital media companies for the rise in uptake rather than obviously the addictive nature of e-cigs.
Youre strawmanning the argument here. My argument was and is that they did nothing to prevent the rise in the youth vaping epidemic until it was literally an epidemic, and they didnt. Trying to classify them as medical devices to fall under that reg does nothing for youth smoking even if it were successful, but of course it wasnt.
Youre showing exactly why there was a decade+ of incompetence leading to 6% of HSers smoking for 10+ years and tens if not hundreds of billions spent on medical intervention for youth. Idk how in holy hell you can sit there and pretend that was the FDA working as intended. The people at the FDA CTP were, in fact, stupid and told me repeatedly that (a) the rise in data around use I was sharing was not relevant or useful, (b) I'd be investigated by OIG if I continued sharing it, and (c) that the eventual rise in uptake of e-cigs by youth was actually digital media/tech companies fault.
Its all so absurd, the more absurd thing is you letting them off the hook for overseeing the whole thing
From what I've seen, the odds of Trump's people changing agencies so they produce better results is zero. They clearly don't care how the agencies work or what would help them with their mission. They seem uninterested in learning anything about the machine they are smashing repeatedly with a metal pipe in the hope it breaks.
My prediction is we will come out of this with agencies that work moderately worse. They will be more risk averse (since the punishment for any screw-up under Trump's people will be worse), have lower capacity (since Trump is undermining their ability to do things) and will be incapable of new initiatives (since they'll be constantly responding to a sea of poorly thought out EOs that get reworded and rescinded three days later).
Which is sad! I would like our agencies to do better. Anger that they don't is warranted. But what we are getting isn't repair or rebuilding, it's demolition.
We will see. I for one think that its actually quite low hanging fruit to find the 10-15% of every single federal dollar that goes to Medicare, Medicaid, and SBA that are lost to fraud, waste, and abuse. It just requires doing some cross-agency data work that Feds are absolutely against doing ever.
My mother and maternal grandfather were career civil servants. I might have gone that way, but for my distaste for security clearances and drug tests. I did work for the federal judiciary for two years, one of the few professional federal jobs you can get without submitting your private affairs to your employers’ scrutiny.
I see the federal civil service as a group of conscientious, risk averse rule followers. It wastes far too much time worrying about typos, but it’s big enough and powerful enough to keep most things pretty safe. I would like to prune it just the right amount.
agreed. But I would also argue that much of what the administrative state does wasn't required by congress but has built up over decades by the executive branch.
Wait, but earlier you were the one saying Congress can't be the ones making the rules about whether and how civil servants can be fired, that has to be up to the executive branch. Now you're saying that the executive branch wrongly built up the power of the administrative state. So Congress is supposed to define what the agencies do and the executive is supposed to decide how to staff them? Or is it that Congress does the hiring and the Executive does the firing?
Why? Because people who are otherwise capable sometimes fail them?
Do you think it increases their vulnerability to blackmail to have to take the drug test? I see that argument if you can "cheat" the test, and now your drug use is a secret that can be held over you, in which case assuming there's no _other_ reason to block it you should allow it (see - homosexuality preventing security clearances), but I would think those are more difficult to cheat so they'd be less vulnerable to this.
As a homosexual user of cannabis and alcohol, it has long seemed to me that it would be reasonable to treat all three of those traits on a par, rather than treating one or two of them as disqualifying and the other as irrelevant as long as it doesn’t take over your life.
While I will never judge anyone for acting in their own best interest, ordinary people taking action in extraordinary circumstances is how heroes are born, and how they are remembered by history. Look at the ones who bailed because it got tough-Charlie Dent, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake-and how much influence and change has that affected? Take a stand, do not comply. Be a hero.
This is somewhat orthogonal to your point in this piece, but I think there is also a need to cultivate a related ethos of "going down trying" when it comes to tough election campaigns. It is vastly preferable for Sherrod Brown or Jon Tester to campaign hard and lose than preemptively retire before a tough race as Manchin did. Especially if you idiosyncratically have the highest WAR for your individual seat. I have such massive respect for Tim Ryan for willingly jumping into a race vs Vance he knew he was likely to lose but had the highest expected value of winning over all other possible candidates.
Also, don't be a Resistance Saboteur. That just makes it easier for Trump to cull the civil service, and provides an easy excuse for those Heritage Foundation interns to be MAGA saboteurs is the next Democratic administration.
Agree, need to be as above board as possible in any questioning of legality of any directives. Preserving regular administrative rule of law is much more important than preserving any particular political policies.
This whole thing is so weird to me. Can anyone remember issues with "resistance saboteurs" during previous transitions. Policy disagreements happen of course, but I can't remember Bush complaining the civil service was engaged in active sabotage.
I mean, people who work in the WH and would have done this are political appointees and not career civil servants, so this example is somewhat moot. I think this is also of a completely different class of activity than intentionally undermining major policy initiatives.
I've seen this, and I'm not saying it is inaccurate, but Sherk is one of the architects of P2025 and not a reliable source in my view. I'm willing to concede this is functionally an ad hominem argument, but I think a reasonable person who has observed the past couple of weeks might reasonably conclude Sherk is not a great source.
Sherk is also intellectually dishonest, for what it's worth. A lot of his writings have circular citations (he makes a claim and cites his own work where he makes the same claim rather than providing proof for a claim). This may not be a deal breaker for you either, but his specific examples are somewhat risible. To pick a few:
"Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze, which was issued soon after he first took office, by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to adjust the start dates retroactively to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office"
So there was no hiring freeze when the hiring was completed. Hiring takes months.
"Department of Labor (DOL) regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a
departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have
produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day."
If this were true, it might be damning. But's it's much more believable that the attorneys said it would take a year to complete a draft rulemaking (publishing stuff to the Federal Register Notice and waiting 60 days) then it would take a year to write some words on a page.
As a federal employee, thank you for this. This articulates my general mindset since this fiasco started, but it really helps with my resolve seeing it in writing by a columnist I respect. I'm staying put. #notresigning
Thank you
I hope you and your fellow employees keep it up and stay the course. The next administration will owe you a huge debt of gratitude.
Superlike™️.
I think the biggest underlying point to dems is: keep your eye on the ball.
Musk doing maybe a Nazi salute, Getting rid of performative DEI or culture war stuff, noted but not worth yelling about.
Trump following through on tariffs that are expected to raise costs for everyone- fucking hammer him on.
Definitely an important point, Dems can't get distracted when Trump goads them into taking the unpopular side of a culture war.
But I maintain, you are in fact allowed to express public dismay when the president's top donor and advisor does a gesture that is either a nazi salute or some other fascist gesture. Musk is actually not a popular person. His approval rating is in the high 30s, and has fallen since the summer. I don't think Dems can build a politics on the back of ferociously attacking billionares, but I think Musk is making himself into an easy target.
"you are in fact allowed to express public dismay when the president's top donor and advisor does a gesture that is either a nazi salute or some other fascist gesture."
Quoted for truth!
It's very hard to make a reasoned, thoughtful cogent argument against chaos and the tearing down of everything. Like "knife to a gun fight" kind of problem. If you pick one thing to focus on, then tomorrow there will be a new outrage. And the kittens will face pressure to chase the laser pointer in a new direction.
There is *so* much bad happening and will happen, that to point to one thing -- e.g., tariffs -- and say *that's* the golden ticket won't work.
I'm not sure what the best strategy is to fight against the agent of chaos, at least until the American people directly the feel pain and are open to the opposition's argument. Until then, probably the best strategy is not to pick one thing but to make the argument about Chaos itself. Just try to paint a picture of Trump and his minions as being out of control and totally corrupt, to be illustrated with examples as appropriate. Just be modest in your expectations about how that will move people, at least until they feel the pain themselves.
The J6 pardons seem like a huge weak point. You point out the main reasoning, and I would add:
-They cannot be reversed.
-Pardonees will be a font of criminal behavior for years and years. One was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop recently, one is facing child pornography charges, and one just went to prison for killing someone while driving drunk.
"J6 rioter pardoned by Trump does [horrible crime]" is a headline that needs to be amplified.
Unfortunately, in post-materialist society, the loudest people on both sides only care about the performative culture war stuff.
Even inflation was culture war-icized. Suddenly we had inflation because Biden's administration was "teaching girls Ghana about gender ideology" or some other such bs right wing media cooked up.
The voters supposedly cared about inflation and yet voted for 25% tariffs on our two biggest trading partners. Trump and Vance both admitted there would be economic pain. We can't keep letting Trump voters off the hook; they knew what they were voting for and did it anyway, because it would hurt the "right" people. The economy was just a pretext.
I don’t believe the majority of Trump voters had all of the following traits: a) knew what tariffs are, b) believed Trump would implement them, c) believed they would cause pain. This is a classic “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance” situation (not that there aren’t a whole lot of malicious Trump voters).
I don’t care if we are “letting voters off the hook” or adequately punishing them to some standards or other. I care about whether we are making things better, and making bad things like this less likely to happen in the future. If that involves punishing voters, do that, and if that involves flattering voters for their previous bad judgment, then do that. Whatever makes this not happen in future, no matter how distasteful it seems.
"The voters supposedly cared about inflation and yet voted for 25% tariffs on our two biggest trading partners."
Most probably don't know what tariffs are.
It's up to politicians themselves then to not get caught up in the culture war performances
The fact that they are like deer in headlights now that Trump is making good on his economic campaign promises says otherwise IMO.
Oh they were paying attention just fine. They simply believed themselves to be exempt from the impact of the implementation of Trump's policies. The cost was to be borne by "those people," not MAGA nation. Their rude awakening is going to be a rather long one IMO.
I'm torn on the Nazi salute thing.
As a normal person it makes me upset and dismayed. As an American whose grandfather came very close to death fighting the Nazis in 1944 Belgium, it makes my blood boil.
However, it's quite clear that Musk calculated this to provoke controversy while leaving enough space for his supporters to pretend there is plausible deniability.
My thought? As much as it hurts, MY is right. Note it, wait, then run ads against the crazier Republicans that show them with Musk and Musk giving the nazi salute. Make them own this.
I watched the salute. I registered it as what it was, and specifically as the crossing of a line that can never be uncrossed. Then I looked at which of my friends, colleagues and trusted news sources acknowledged what I saw, and which ones refused to. It was actually quite liberating -- in the sense that I know who will have my back if things get really bad, and who will be guarding the camps.
There was no salute of any kind. That was a lie.
What was it then?
Dude, I watched the video myself.
Then you need to watch some videos of actual salutes.
I was quite into WWII as a kid, I'm very familiar.
I always get a kick out of this meme: https://imgflip.com/i/7yhu7u
Evergreen meme
Um, no. Like, not even a little bit.
To make sure, I watched some footage from a couple of Nuremberg rallies. Having seen Elon's efforts, I have to conclude that if anything, he's been practicing. His angle is basically perfect.
Also, if you want to have plausible deniability about your Nazi salute, it's probably not a good idea to turn 180 degrees and *repeat it.* "No, really, I just did that! Here it is again so you can compare!"
I agree. My most recent Substack post was about how, in the context of the cultural shift toward more pronounced disagreeableness and masculinity, the Democratic party needs to focus on making the argument that Trump is (a) incompetent, and (b) corrupt.
There's no social referee to appeal to any longer. Whether or not he's bigoted (clearly yes, in my opinion), and whether or not what he says or does is offensive and crass (likewise), those things are actually not relevant to whether he is (a) incompetent or (b) corrupt.
The Democratic party has spent too much time appealing to decency, democracy, politeness, egalitarianism--and the culture has shifted to where enough people want to see dynamism and change, and are willing to accept offensiveness and authority as the price that you pay to get greatness.
So it's about demonstrating that Trumpism is not a path to American greatness and not about demonstrating that Trumpism is politically incorrect or low-class. That's a settled question by now, and the answer to that question doesn't have enough political salience with enough people to be germane to future elections.
My strategy is to look at the chaos, and pick the parts that are salient for the people who I know aren't paying attention or who otherwise support MAGA. For example, my parents love Trump, but are also super proud of the small business I started. Letting them know that the trade war with Mexico will hike my cost of goods 20%, and tariffs on Canada will reduce my topline 12% cuts through the noise. No matter what Fox tells them about it, they now have an anecdote that is more salient. Don't get lost in the river of bullshit, channel the chunks floating down where they need to go!
The Fed governors in particular have the added safeguard that if they get fired for political reasons, the markets will (presumably) freak out.
Trump will pay a lower price for firing most officials, so he’ll fire more of them; conversely if he fires or tries to fire the Fed leadership we’re in an especially bad way.
It astounds me that Trumps net approval rating is still positive. The median voter wants the chaos, or at least a few weeks of chaos adjacent political theater.
I believe Biden’s approval rating was solidly in the 50s at the beginning of his presidency. Expect for Trumps to fall, especially if the GOP tries to cut welfare programs.
Basically after the midterms inflation bit and Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan (which was very well orchestrated) solidified the public's negative sentiments towards his administration. The fact he chose to ignore his dismal approval ratings for two years is nuts.
He insisted he could win and keep running for reelection in spite of all the dismal headwinds. He kept up the coalitional appeasement and split the baby act even when his approval rating was in the 30s-40s. The biggest thing I admit in retrospect that his administration did wrong was dismiss inflation concerns with the transitory and focus only on jobs numbers (I was guilty of this attitude too.)
It took an unprecedented and massive collective effort for him to slowly and reluctantly acknowledge that he did not have the ability to run for reelection. And he still insists that he could have beat Trump again. He basically threw a temper tantrum during the lame duck and did silly things like declare a new constitutional amendment ratified.
The Democratic Party is in a terrible position in terms of popularity and public perception now.
I wonder whether the public would have been ok with the inflation if we had just kept interest rates low and let prices rise commensurately. We’ll never know, but the US economy, with its high rates of homeownership and widespread availability of credit cards, is really evolved for a cheap money world. Everyone feels trapped in their house if they were lucky enough to buy or refinance before COVID, and everyone else feels priced out.
And woe to those who had significant variable interest debt, which is a lot of people.
Could we have managed inflation without raising rates - managed meaning settling at higher prices than the counterfactual, but not hyperinflation? I understand that rates now are historically low, but only seniors remember that history, and for what it’s worth houses were a lot cheaper back in those days even in inflation-adjusted terms.
Also, why isn’t there a way to transfer my existing mortgage to a different property? It seems like a no-brainer for the government/Fannie Mae to create and promote this kind of product to make the housing market more liquid.
He didn't listen to MattY. He let the flood of "asylum" seekers continue until 6 months before the election. He didn't pivot to the supply side of the economy to improve the cost of living.
Wouldn’t we want to ask the question the other way? In that two years, what actions did he take that showed he was mindful of his low approval rating and wanted to change it?
The median voter remains wilfully ignorant of most of the important matters in the USA.
I genuinely have serious doubts his approval rating will remain this high; especially if these tariffs remain in place for any length of time.
Biden’s approval rating was well above 50% through the summer of 2021 remember. Lots of swing voters who maybe tepidly voted for him this time because of inflation are unlikely to just change their mind immediately. Human psychology doesn’t work that way.
I’d also take a look at polling of the particular actions he’s take. Pardoning the J6 insurrectionists was not actually popular.
Here's an anecdote about a Trump-voting police officer who's already out protesting over the January 6 pardons. But yes, for most people, there will be more latency.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/31/texas-immigrants-undocumented-trump-deportation/
I understand that people are cross-pressured and can convince themselves that the worst won't happen and it's good that the scales are falling from this guy's eyes . . . but my god.
https://condenaststore.com/featured/he-tells-it-like-it-is-paul-noth.html?srsltid=AfmBOopA91tpAFyMbfK7kmI9lAERV3MFkito-AhRnx4TunR7IHUgcE17
I think at this point the media voter prefers chaos to status quo. We'll see how that all plays out when consequences start to be broadly felt.
“Media voters” — a typo of truth?
A Kinsley typo
Liked for "typo of truth"
The median voter has no idea that so and so DOJ official quit or Elon has such and such federal payment system, most of the normal people I know just put their heads down after inauguration day and went back to life
They also probably don’t know that all federal grants got canceled and that a lot of people stopped getting their HIV medicine.
The PEPFAR thing in particular seems like a huge own-goal.
I'm glad to drink one less Coke Zero per year to stop a child in Africa from dying of AIDS.
And, also, Fed governors are in a great position relative to a more junior official who needs to resign simply because being fired out of the blue may leave them unemployed for a long stretch, whereas resignation is presumably planned in advance and gives them time to get on the job market. I am certain any Fed governor would have little difficulty securing well-compensated employment.
I had a couple beers on Friday night with my sole conservative friend. We actually had a pretty good time, other than his singing of a song he wrote called "Daddy Sold Trump Flags," which was sung to the tune of a John Prine song (don't remember which) and had a sort of folksy wholesomeness totally disconnected to the reality of the Trump movement. As he was walking out of the bar, he yelled "The king is back!" after I made a crack about Trump's tiny hands.
Last night I talked to my sister who works at the EPA. She said she had a good weekend but was dreading going back to work. Even when she can mentally prepare herself, there's always someone else at work who's not holding it together very well, and there are plenty of good young people that are on probation because they haven't worked there long enough, and they're likely gone. She's going to stick it out like Matt suggests and make them fire her, but she expects a lot of unpleasantness, and it's draining to work somewhere where you've only had excellent performance reviews, and yet they're going to cut you anyway because of an undeserved civil purge.
I had to delete my friend's number after speaking to her. I can't really reconcile being friends with someone who doesn't give a shit that my sister and a lot of good people are going to lose their jobs because Trump is giving him the cultural war victories he craves. I want to add that he's expecting his fifth kid, and his time consuming work in window repair is unlikely to keep his family at a very high living standard. When the Trump tariffs wreck the economy, he's going to feel it, but I'm not sure if he'll ever abandon the man who's hurting the people he wants to hurt.
You should let him know. Not in a jerky way. But in a respectful tone, while making clear that you're still friends, tell him that you can't hang out with someone who is celebrating harm to your family. He thinks politics is just trash talk but it's actually serious business that affects real people's lives, and he should know that.
Well said, evan! It's possible that this may actually make the friend reflect and regret words said.
“it's draining to work somewhere where you've only had excellent performance reviews, and yet they're going to cut you anyway”
Nobody in the private sector can expect that their job is secure regardless of how good their individual performance is; if their company or industry falls on hard times, their individual performance matters for nothing. Good performers will usually find jobs elsewhere, but the only thing that’s sure is constant change.
I get there are jobs we want insulated from petty politicization, but if the mindset of a whole organization is taken over by people resistant to change, sometimes it takes drastic measures to shake that up. It’s not necessarily pleasant for the individuals involved, just as building new housing isn’t necessarily great for the people who live in a given neighborhood right now, but might be preferable for the greater good.
In reading about these attempts to reform and update how the federal government works, and the opposition to it, I keep thinking of that kind of schlocky self-book that was popular in the early 2000s, “Who Moved My Cheese?”.
"but if the mindset of a whole organization is taken over by people resistant to change, sometimes it takes drastic measures to shake that up."
Is that what's going on? Or is the Federal bureaucracy being purged so that Trump can install sycophants who'll do whatever he asks and undermine the rule of law? How would a bunch of partisan yes-men be "preferable for the greater good." I don't know if you're aware, but I haven't seen Trump do anything for the greater good in his entire life.
You can try to rationalize it as much as you like, but he's consolidating the power of the executive branch. I also appreciate your lack of empathy for thousands of Federal employees. Sure, nobody has a guaranteed job in the private sector, but the government sure as hell shouldn't be run as a business.
On this very comment board, I’ve heard repeatedly complaints about how sclerotic and dumber the federal government’s personnel management practices are, for example how hard it is hire people. I’ve also seen for myself examples of federal agencies acting in inefficient ways that prioritize their own convenience without any apparent thought or accountability for the significant larger costs they are imposing externally on everyone else.
The last time I remember Democrats seriously talking about addressing this was Al Gore’s “Reinventing Government” initiative which ended up being mostly theoretical.
If people who care about good government and policy won’t address this, somebody else will.
Trump turning this sentiment to the end of conducting a political purge and installing a bunch of corrupt sycophants, instead of actually improving state capacity, risks discrediting the idea that there's really something broken here.
First, the Democrats will just undo all of it the next time they take power, instead of being forced to swallow genuine reforms, which they dislike, because the reforms turned out to work.
Second, no future Republican president is going to want to grasp this issue if this attempt created enough unpopular chaos to lose '26 and '28.
Absent an epochal realignment, the right wielding a hammer on bureaucratic sclerosis simply will not be durable, and will preclude the possibility of anyone trying to wield a scalpel.
So what is the actual course of action to take here? If none of the actors involved have any interest in reforming the system how do you actually reform it?
If no one is interested in reforming the system, it will not be reformed.
You could try to build a political coalition yourself for specific, concrete reforms, as Matt has been trying to do re housing policy for the past 20 years. You know, the slow boring of hard boards and all that.
I have no idea.
I am going to buy assets or shares of assets I expect to increase in value because regulatory sclerosis makes it impossible to build or make enough of them to insulate my family's finances from the damage, and vote for whomever seems more likely to try to fix the problem.
If a CEO of a private company sent a directive to all employees putting in jeopardy their future position, department and company without a replacement direction or a plan while at the same time violating laws of a publicly traded corporation the board of directors would fire him in a heart beat even if they had just appointed him. Such comparisons to private business ought to have some basis in reality.
Not always true. There are plenty of examples of collusion between boards of directors and CEO's.
Especially if the board actually thinks the CEO is doing what's needed.
Agreed, No analogy is perfect.
Are you going to make up some hoax about Russia, Russia, Russia now? It has been proven: NO COLLUSION! Therefore your rebuttal has no merit.
If governments payments for aid and grants aren’t transparent somebody will make them transparent. It should be government officials. The fact that it isn’t is also a failure of government.
Don't worry, Musk has already found a way to make payments by the federal government transparent here: https://www.usaspending.gov/
Honestly impressive how quickly he was able to use his technological prowess to put this together!
OMB has run this since 2007, and this iteration of the site being around since 2017 (first release notes on the github).
"Honestly impressive" - the glazing is insufferable
A lot of people project their own lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of how to fill that gap with random cultural osmosis from movies or something.
True but I don’t think that’s really in dispute. The converse is also true, and in this case does seem to be in dispute: the fact that a particular proposed solution will not make things better does not prove that no problem exists.
To strive to make government better, the first step is to believe in government as a potential force for good.
You'd think this is where the Thomas Sowell fanboys would pop up. But alas, just silence.
“[Trump is] consolidating the power of the executive branch“
US Constitution, Article II, Section 1:
“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
If only he would actually execute the laws, instead of making up his own.
But that's the problem with the whole administrative state. The executive has WAY too much power to make up it's own rules and regulations.
I would love to see SCOTUS gut the administrative state. Congress doesn't have to jot every I and T, but laws need to be pretty detailed and bureaucrats shouldn't be empowered to make major changes to the country. Congress needs to.
The administrative state gives the executive too much power. Let's solve this problem by letting the executive ignore laws governing the administrative state. Brilliant analysis.
I think the part of the administrative state that makes regs & rules should report to Congress and not the president. But that is a separate issue entirely from what Trump is doing.
"If the President does it, that means it is not illegal."
If you read Article II carefully, it actually says the president is allowed to do unlimited crimes.
What laws did he make up on his own?
The law that says the president can cancel any spending he wants.
Spending is not at the discretion of the president. The TikTok ban had no ability for him to delay it the way that he did. He's been granting people in DOGE access to information requiring security clearance without them having gone through the required steps to gain it. I could go on, but if you are not convinced, you are not going to be.
Ken for the win.
Each line of the Constitution exists in the context of all that came before it and all that will come after it within that document.
“I don't see where in the text you quoted that it says the president is not obligated to follow those laws”
That’s in Section 3. I didn’t think it needed to be quoted in response to the comment I was replying to.
Yes, normally presidents act to install people who will obfuscate and resist them at every turn. Trump is certainly overturning the status quo in this regard.
Perhaps the question should be asked why is there such obfuscation and resistance to this particular president. Why should the president's motives go unquestioned here, especially when we already have a pretty good idea of what's driving them.
I feel this is exactly the sort of false justifications that we don't need to excuse criminal conduct.
1) There is no excuse for breaking the law. New CEOs coming in to turn around struggling businesses do not get to break the law.
2) Trump didn't just not run on much of what is now happening, he explicitly disavowed it (Project 2025). I'd be amazed if you can show me anyone talking about anything like "feeding USAID into the woodchipper" from the campaign.
3) I think you've also caricatured the dynamism of the private sector. Many people work for private sector companies that are themselves fairly sclerotic bureaucracies. They don't employ millions, but they do employ tens or hundreds of thousands. Such organisations do evolve but they very, very rarely disappear. Even when the go bust, which is rare, the government often bails them out.
Plus the USAID stuff from Musk appears to be the result of him following a neo-fascist influencer on social media who accuses USAID of controlling the CIA.
I'm all for making efficiencies. The federal government shouldn't waste one penny. But Musk is jiving us into believing there's some kind of government waste and inefficiency "crisis" that justifies extreme measures. This seems wrong. In sheer fiscal terms, we all know what is driving excessive borrowing: insufficient revenues+retirement and healthcare programs+interest on the debt. (The military spends a pretty penny, too, but its share of GDP has been modest or declining for decades, so...).
The point is, the nuts-and-bolts bureaucratic part of the federal government doesn't seem particularly wasteful, in sheer financial terms. Federal non-military employment peaked in 1990, and is now something like 20% smaller, despite the fact that our population and GDP are much larger thirty-five years on. Also, if you've been following the "international competitiveness" discourse, you'll know the US economy has been leaving the rest of the rich world in the dust over the last half decade. We have our problems, but they don't seem to be related to a "crisis of government bloat." (Indeed, the United States has a modest-sized government by rich world standards.)
Musk is trying to bullshit the country into greenlighting a profound restructuring of our government.
It's not about being at risk of losing your job. It's about being terrorized by fanatic true believers who hold that you are a corrupt member of the Deep State and an enemy of The People.
It's more like being in the private sector and your boss being a racist who sexually harasses you. Sure, you can quit and get another job, maybe in another town, losing all your friends. But does that make it okay?
If you think these guys are intent on making government better, well, all I can say is . . . actually there's nothing I can say to you.
Or if you had a new CEO at a paper company who turned out to believe that the marketing department was part of Pizzagate or something and tried to purge it because of something he saw on Twitter.
No, this can't be it. The USAID employees trying to keep malnourished kids alive in Africa are definitely evil and part of the deep state.
"Nobody in the private sector can expect that their job is secure regardless of how good their individual performance is; if their company or industry falls on hard times, their individual performance matters for nothing."
Noting that what outraged federal workers are complaining about is standard treatment in at-will employment in the private sector is simultaneously two things-
1. Also my knee-jerk response, "boo-hoo, your employment isn't 100% secure, poor baby, welcome to the real world that most of the country lives in, buck up buttercup." It's annoying to hear people who generally have very good job security complain about being subjected to the same whims that most American workers are subject to.
2. A great way of dividing people who should have a shared interest in a labor-friendly environment. Getting private sector workers to go "haha not so special anymore" to government workers is crab bucket mentality - celebrating everyone being dragged down to the same unpredictable and exploitable level rather than trying to lift more workers up to a place where they have a more stable work situation.
Normal at-will workers generally aren't fired in political purges every 4 years. There are legitimate policy reasons to think the civil service should not be upended every 4 years when a political transition happens. This is a separate and distinct question from whether it should be easier to fire civil service workers for performance or cause.
I would also be curious if there is any private sector equivalent to a CEO saying something like this to their workforce. From Vought:
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
This personally does not seem like a particularly effective strategy for motivating employee performance to me. I think it's pretty easy to imagine scenarios where layoffs or other changes to a workforce might need to occur, but I don't think there is anywhere in the private sector where the teleological end is the destruction of the workforce itself.
"Normal at-will workers generally aren't fired in political purges every 4 years"
No, they're fired in layoffs instead.
What I'm talking about here is not what chaotic mass firings does to the civil service - nothing good! shouldn't do it! - instead I'm talking about the framing of individual workers who thought they had job security finding themselves unemployed through no fault of their own as the victims of some unique evil that only Trump and his cronies would dare visit upon someone.
And yes, the C-suite in the private sector will absolutely dump on their employees - look at the excitement about how AI agents can replace humans while also not asking for pesky things like overtime or holidays. People complaining about the mass offer of resignation for a generous severance package apparently haven't heard that in the private sector, they'll just fire you on a Zoom call instead and leave you to file for unemployment.
And this is bad! In the longer term no one should be treated like this, we should all have some kind of job security and protection against getting canned because leadership messed up. But in the short term, today, it is kind of annoying to hear federal workers complain that they're being treated like most private sector workers.
Yes, this. It is worth remembering that it was the real-world issues generated by the crappiness of political "accountability" via the spoils system (with the cherry on top being the assassination of Garfield by a deranged disappointed office-seeker) that led us to the Pendleton Act and the creation of the civil service in the first place. Not every governmental arrangement that has been around for a long time is stupid or evil just because a ketamine-addled robber baron says so, and amnesia around the fact that such arrangements were created to alleviate problems - and in some circumstances, human suffering - the alleviation of which modern civilized countries have generally decided is the government's job - is no excuse for "move-fast/break-things" idiocy.
But in the private sector, people are often paid much more than in an equivalent public sector job.
Part of the reason government workers accept lower pay is because the government is supposed to be stable.
If that bargain is no longer the case then the people who remain may demand wage increases.
Federal employees have higher compensation than private sector employees.
That's dependent on educational attainment:
"For federal workers whose highest level of education was a master’s degree or more, the cost of total compensation (the sum of wages and benefits) was less, on average, than the cost for their counterparts in the private sector. For workers with less education, the government spent more on total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics...By 2022, federal compensation had declined relative to private-sector compensation, primarily because lawmakers enacted across-the-board salary increases for federal employees that were smaller than wage growth in the private sector."
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235#:~:text=Comparison%20of%20Total%20Compensation%20*%20Among%20workers,than%20for%20similar%20private%2Dsector%20employees%2C%20on%20average.
"if the mindset of a whole organization is taken over by people resistant to change, sometimes it takes drastic measures to shake that up."
Never thought I'd see the day when it was left to the federal workforce to "Stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"
> 1. It has nothing to do with improving federal services, it's entirely about petty partisan culture war signaling.
This seems a little unfair - that "signaling" is in many ways a disagreement about what federal services should be offered and to whom.
But I wholeheartedly agree with your second and third points.
> a disagreement about what federal services should be offered and to whom.
what a silly gloss on what's actually happening
So what, nothing can change ever? Like I said, I agree that the process so far is dumb.
The fact that people without a security clearance got access to the entirety of Treasury transaction files is simply more important than anything you've mentioned. The entirety of our security clearance process exists to prevent things like this.
I can agree on a practical and personal level, but it might still all be on the up and up? I'm not sure about the nuances regarding how Trump can grant clearance to people. Hopefully there are sharp legal minds looking into, and where appropriate contesting, these things.
DEI sucks up more resources than it should. Removing it allows better focus on other things, ergo, potentially better services and certainly better targeted. Successful execution, of course, remains to be seen.
Good for you. No need to keep your sole conservative friend. Your sister will now be better off.
It’s weird, right?
Both that they kept the friendship this long but no longer and that so many Trump people are just way too into him.
*whoosh*
That wasn't the reason given.
It pretty clearly was.
Your sister doesn't 'deserve' her job. Civil servants serve under the terms which, and as long as, the State, installed by the people or their representatives, requires. That's the nature of government. If she wants a position inured from any kind of political shifts, she should find a position which does not use tax dollars to fund her salary.
Yes, let's go back to the spoils system. I see Trump isn't the only person who thinks the 1880s were America's golden age.
You can't keep bureaucrats in jobs just because it causes them personal hardship and unhappiness to not have that job, but I understand that you are simply being emotional and I understand that.
Let’s not talk about what one “can” or “can’t” do. Let’s talk about what one *should* do. It’s true that we shouldn’t keep people in jobs just because they’d be unhappy if they lost their job. But equally, we shouldn’t remove people from jobs just because they’d be unhappy if they lost their job.
Deciding whether or not someone should keep their job should be based on whether they are doing their job well and whether it should be done. It doesn’t seem like either of those is a consideration here.
The main thing is that whatever your view is of whether the jobs should be done, the answer should be determined through changing laws - statutes, regulations, etc. - not by the President (or Elon Musk acting as his valet) simply deciding. Yes elected officials have the authority to take action on things by virtue of having been elected, but their authority is defined and limited by law because that's how our system of government works. We don't elect people to have dictatorial powers for the duration of their terms. A democracy that does that isn't going to be a democracy for long.
The Executive Branch is subject to the authority of the Executive. What law do you imagine could change that?
You think Congress should have to pass a bill to fire government employees?
Wow, so edgy. You're a very talented trash talker, kudos on that, but I personally don't think that's what this forum is about, nor do I think it adds value.
I mean you said that I, like Trump, personally think the 1880s were America's Golden Age and that I want a spoils system, neither of which have anything to do with my position that State employees serve at the pleasure of the leaders of the State, and it has always been thus.
Did your comment to me add value, Evan?
That is literally what the spoils system is. Maybe you genuinely don't understand that, but if so, then yes my comment to you added value by giving you information you are ignorant of.
The spoils system no. But civil service protections as currently implemented are BS.
civil service should be at will employment. People that don't do their jobs or who are not aligned with management should be fired.
That is what the spoils system is. You just want to call it by a different name.
It should certainly be easier to fire poor performers (or, more likely, non-performers) for cause, but the wholesale gutting of the administrative state created and empowered by Congress is a bad thing.
I don't believe the congress is constitutionally able to give that much power to the administrative state. Nor do I think it's a good idea.
And if you are going to do it, then you need to make it easier to the executive to hold them accountable.
Somewhere elected officials need to be in charge. Someone voters can fire.
"I don't believe the congress is constitutionally able to give that much power to the administrative state"
?? If not them, then whom? Surely the executive shouldn't be able to unilaterally say "and none of the people I hire can be fired forevermore."
There are entire countries that manage to thrive without at-will employment.
thrive is a relative term of course.
For example, US GDP per capita is about 50% higher than in Germany. That's a HUGE difference.
This is incompetence masquerading as toughness.
There's certainly a good argument to be made that the specific positions being eliminated are badly chosen, but simply 'nobody should have her government job threatened because it makes her feel bad' is not tenable.
Neither is it tenable to say “civil servants *should* have their jobs threatened because it makes them feel bad”, and that seems to be the organizing principle - hate and punishment.
to this point private companies go to considerable lengths to try to assure the remaining employees of their value after layoffs because their morale is even more important after the downsizing. And while there is an understanding that layoffs happen in the private sector private companies generally do try to give employees a level of assurance that increases morale and helps employees make decisions that are in line with the (longer) timetables associated with corporate initiatives. Yes it is true that a corporate employee could be let go at any time. But on the other hand companies offer stock or options on. 3-5 year vesting schedules and employees do not generally consider these useless (because while some of them will not survive to see them vest, many actually will!)
And a company that has horrible morale will have trouble recruiting quality people, risking eventually going out of business. At least then the competitors may be attractive. Meanwhile, if no one smart wants to work at Treasury after this month for a generation, then the country as a whole is worse off. This type of behavior is horrible for getting quality employees into government.
Musk is operating under conspiracy theories from a website he owns. Pretending otherwise is delusional.
How did you get from the original comment to this? The commenter's phrase "undeserved civil purge" isn't making the case that the civil service get jobs like first amendment rights or anything else.
The original commenter is _I think_ implying that Trump and Musks' attempt to gut the federal workforce isn't something that workforce deserves in the moral sense of just desserts.
Like, if someone had shut down TSA after one of their incidents of luggage theft back in the day we could have an argument about whether getting rid of those employees was justified. Or if this was all part of a large austerity package, then we'd at least have a 'why' that takes the moral question out ("you did nothing to deserve this, but there's no money"). Or if there was a big bribery ring in a field office and the whole office got canned, we'd say "yeah you all deserved that, plus to be prosecuted."
But Musks' hijacking of OPM isn't any of these things - the Trump people have stated multiple times that they believe the rank and file are full of insubordinate leftists. So if you work for the government and aren't an insubordinate leftist and Trump's people take over OPM and try to make your job a living hell, you might go "the hell did I do to deserve this??" and it would have nothing to do with any guarantees of employment.
Singing pro-Trump lyrics to a John “your flag decal won’t get you into heaven” Prine song is a hell of a thing to do
Did you ever discuss with your friend what your sister's experience has been like? I feel like if you and your friend are/were friends there's a chance for persuasion there.
(FWIW I tried 'having that talk' and it went poorly and I felt quite frustrated later, but I felt like it was important to try.)
Thank you. This kind of testifying is incredibly important.
"replace the entire government with Heritage Foundation interns"
The Heritage Foundation literally cannot find enough interns with triple-digit IQ's to replace anything.
Barring a complete turnaround of this entire endeavor, I think these first several weeks decisively disprove the notion that the right has the brainpower to fix much of anything.
The left's brainpower may be too wrapped up in persuading itself of unempirical crap and the professional class's in buttering its own bread, so it's possible that the right smashing everything, things that work and things that don't alike, is the *only* way forward to getting rid of the things that don't work... but it'll be a fucking mess.
I don't think they want to "fix" anything the way you're using that term.
I know Musk comes across as some kind of weird techno-futurist with pie-in-the-sky but unworkable ideas, but I suspect that the best way to understand his political ideology is that it's just very old-fashioned "shrink the federal government until we can drown it in a bathtub" Norquist-ism. He isn't the first wealthy businessmen to hit middle age and become enthralled with this worldview. "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
The issue is that due to the accretion of process around our regulatory establishment and its weaponization by, succinctly, the fucking lawyers and NIMBY nutjobs, the government just straight-up *is* the problem in a number of fields of endeavor, most prominently manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and energy.
This isn't to say, in any way, that government regulation of these fields isn't necessary, but to say that the current regulations and processes are *unfit for purpose* in most every way.
I guess you and Musk and Norquist actually have the same worldview. My mistake.
Ok, so you want it to continue to be:
- Impossible to build green generation capacity or transmission corridors therefore.
- Wildly expensive and very slow to build transit infrastructure.
- Ruinously expensive for private firms to build advanced manufacturing plants and crippling to international competitiveness to pay the legal and compliance burdens associated with running them.
- Legally difficult to build housing at all and particularly slow when doing in-fill development, such that soft costs raise prices by more than $80k per unit in the median jurisdiction.
If you think the regulatory environment is working then those must be your desired outcomes. Congratulations, the United States will look like Argentina in a few generations.
Whatever, my asset-rich grandkids will have personal servants.
You're describing less than 1% of what the federal government does, and I want those problems to be fixed through legislation and the slow boring of hard boards, not by firing thousands of federal workers who (a) haven't done anything wrong and (b) mostly don't work on these issues. Grover Norquist doesn't pretend to care about any of the issues you highlighted, maybe consider the possibility that his solutions won't help but will actually make things worse.
Ok, I see now, you literally did not read the comment to which you initially replied, just leapt right off the cliff to go for the jugular first.
The number of pages of government regulation went from 20,000 pages in the 1960's to 180,000 pages now.
Depending on estimates some 10% of GDP is wasted on compliance costs. Or about 3x what we spend on the military.
What's needed isn't tinkering around the edges (which of course isn't to say Trump is actually going to do things right)
I am increasingly confident that the death grip the knowledge worker classes have on the Democratic Party's throat cannot be broken. Their goal is to turn everything into compliance so they can extract their share of the pie even if it strangles the underlying physical endeavor, and the vast majority of them have convinced themselves that this is a morally righteous position to hold, that commitment to process is good in and of itself, that the vast amounts of money they earn administering that process improves outcomes despite all evidence to the contrary.
No one in our entire coalition aside from a relative handful of "neolib" commentators and their diehard fans understands or cares about the incredibly obvious degradation of outcomes, virtually all of the other smart people who vote Democrat directly profit from strangling physical endeavors in red tape.
I see not a single, solitary reason to be optimistic that such reforms are even possible for us to enact, let alone coming. Every single solitary "deregulatory" bill out of state legislatures in CA, MA, NY, NJ... contains a host of even more burdensome requirements that ensure no one will ever take advantage of the deregulated outcome.
All I am saying is that it seems more likely that the other side, being dumb as a rock, just destroys the entire regulatory apparatus than that we trim it down in ways that make sense.
Trump, of course, has no commitment to destroying anything, he just wants his own loyalists in charge of it all and to punch people he doesn't like, hence a *regulatory bar* to green power investment.
Actually housing affordability really could be accomplished by just burning down basically all the housing regulation.
Just let people do what they want with their own property would unleash a ton of housing construction.
Of course, the legal challenges to Trump’s sledgehammer are just another way for the lawyers to capitalize on our collective incompetence
I don't think those two statements are in conflict at all?
It is easily possible for the government to simultaneously cause very real problems with overregulation and for the correct response to not be "don't regulate anything at all."
The US absolutely doesn't need more "state capacity" to deal appropriately with manufacturing, construction, energy, and agriculture regulation and the attendant cluster of permitting and compliance processes. It needs to vastly simplify many regulations pursuing goals that should be pursued, remove wide swathes of regulations which pursue goals that shouldn't be pursued at all, and reallocate all the personnel involved in enforcement or regulation to other endeavors.
This is one field, possibly the only one, in which there really isn't a state capacity argument to be had, it's just clear and obvious regulatory overreach at every freaking step. It is extraordinarily telling that basically every construction and manufacturing worker on earth hates OSHA.
You want to unfuck healthcare? I agree, state capacity all the way. Defense procurement? State capacity. Infrastructure design costs? State capacity. IT procurement and contracting administration? State capacity.
But NEPA? Drown the whole fucking thing in a bathtub and offer everyone who was involved in administration a transfer or a pink slip. OSHA's rules for manufacturing facilities? Fire all the staff lawyers, contract a bunch of reasonably intelligent blue collar workers and managers who came up from the floor to tell you what's sane and what isn't, trim language and rules accordingly.
The government causing *some* very real problems while preventing others does not sound to me like “the government is *the* problem”. It sounds like “part of the government is *a* problem”, which is very different, and calls for something other than just smashing the government.
I don't disagree with any of this! I just read enough history to disbelieve that gradualism is always possible in the face of very entrenched interests.
Could the Roman Republic have reformed its institutions to lead to stable governance and continued maintenance of the infrastructure and military force which made the Mediterranean a safe place to knit together a large-scale trade network? Sure.
Was it actually possible that the Senate and the Optimates would have done so instead of riding the status quo down in flames? I don't think so. In context, the revolutionary change that came with Caesar's overthrow of the Republic and Octavian's creation of the Principate was possibly the least harmful outcome.
What is desirable and what is possible aren't always the same, and when the possible rules out the perfect and even the good, all that's left is the "least bad."
The libertarian in me hopes that this realization (that the left, the right, and the purely self-interested will always exist and will always have irreconcilable differences) will convince the majority of us that expecting the government to take so much responsibility for so much of our lives does not lead down a good path.
The libertarian in me is dead and buried and will stay that way.
Modern, technological societies are complex as shit and rely on an immense amount of regulation and standards-setting to agglomerate information, otherwise far too much information exists for even large, technologically-proficient, specialized organizations to understand. Without such, information asymmetry problems will overwhelm both societal trust and the orderly functioning of markets and everywhere will look like the Philippines or low-end Latin American countries.
The problem is that even in fields where the government (and, in the US, the non-profit professional organizations and standards-setting bodies) is a large and technologically-capable, it struggles with the amount of information relevant to rule-making and standards-setting. There is not and has not for a long time been enough bandwidth to deal with the steady accretion of outdated rules and standards and accumulation of processes.
I don't see what particular fields the government is taking too much responsibility for, I just demand that the regulations and standards be made to fucking work via an orderly sunset process, regular consolidation and simplification of the language used, curtailments of failed policies like NEPA, and the efficient standardization of processes across teams, departments, and fields of endeavor.
The undead libertarian in me (tempered by the realist in me) points out that, yes, we need some rule-making, mainly to deal with the tragedy of the commons and other externalities (if there *are* other externalities - I'm not sure). But we will simply never have an orderly sunset process, because rule- and law-makers will always think that *this particular* rule or law is too important to sunset. And rules will never be effectively consolidated or simplified, because bureaucracy does not work that way and never has. And failed policies like NEPA are very hard to repeal because there are always entrenched stakeholders and demagogues who stand in the way. And, jeez, if there's far too much information for "large, technologically-proficient, specialized organizations to understand" (organizations that are motivated by profit and hence tend to attract the best and brightest), how do you think a massive government will effectively standardize processes related to this information across teams, departments, and fields of endeavor?
So my undead libertarian says, give up on this fantasy, and minimize (though don't eliminate) the role of the government.
I've lived in places like that and traveled to more still. Whatever problems we have because the state has bloated are wildly more tractable than places where it's too small or its reach exceeds its grasp. You as an individual cannot trust any market transaction because the information asymmetry strangles everything, and social trust is nonexistent, which is corrosive to all endeavors that might durably increase economic complexity and thus standard of living.
I am not confident our problems cannot be solved without smashing a bunch of stuff, for the reasons you state.
But if that happens, I am very, very confident that your libertarian paradise/everyone else's shithole is even more untenable as a steady-state and politics will immediately demand that the state start to do more, and the cycle will begin anew.
Good point regarding Ezra Klein. Pursuing executive action isn't the only thing showing weakness; so is the speed (the "muzzle velocity" in Bannon's phrase). If they were slower, quieter and more insidious, they might be more successful in gutting/transforming the government, as his expert noted. Trying to do everything at once is more likely to spark a massive reaction that will finally stop them in their tracks.
Fingers crossed, anyway.
FDR was able to get Congress to rubberstamp almost everything he wanted—he was the most powerful President ever, to a probably scary degree if you weren’t in agreement with his policies (Lincoln’s unique wartime situation aside). Trump isn’t even close; in fact is still living in the world whose creation FDR led, in part because FDR had things written into law by Congress.
It's interesting that Yarvin's whole the-US-needs-a-monarchist uses FDR as his shining example. The Yarvin stuff seems like a lot of hot air but yeah ... it's probably hard to compare our current presidents to FDR's power.
I hope so, but I am not terribly confident that can happen. The Democrats can't even seem to *find* the scalpel, let alone to wield it.
Instead these responsibilities should be taken over by unaccountable corporate entities that are not bound by the political system.
Well, no. Maybe these shouldn't be anyone's "responsibilities" at all, or maybe they should be handled more locally by bureaucrats who are closer to the people they're regulating. I'm not sure what you think I'm envisioning when you say that I'm implying that government responsibilities should be taken over by unaccountable corporate entities.
I know it's a favored right-wing talking point, but do we really need a federal Department of Education?
Yes? It's nice to a have a federal clearinghouse of information that can collection national statistics and other stuff for comparison across states.
It’s nice for whom?
As I mentioned in another comment, "yes, we need some rule-making, mainly to deal with the tragedy of the commons and other externalities." The Clean Water Act is, in principle, about the best example I can think of, of rule-making to deal with the tragedy of the commons.
They should largely be taken over by ourselves.
Ah, yes, everyone will be good at everything and we'll all be yeoman farmers.
I'm trying to think of which services provided by governments were better before they were run by governments. Defense, no. Law enforcement, no. Public works, no. What's first on your list?
If Pete Hegseth can take over DoD, you can take over Medicaid. Confidence, man!
That's the spirit, Marc!
"Never doubt that a few harmless flakes acting together can unleash an avalanche of destruction" - seen on an old Demotivation poster, a lot less funny during the last two weeks.
If you want to do anything more complex than Serengeti Hunter-gatherer lifestyle, then *someone* other than yourself needs to take a lot of responsibility for a lot of things. The question is just *which* responsibilities are taken by people who you have input with and which are taken by complex organizations you don’t have input in, regardless of whether those institutions are called “government” or “religion” or “business” or what.
As the great political philosopher Joni Mitchell said, "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got til it's gone."
You need to pay a 25% tariff for that Joni Mitchell quote!
No reason they can’t resort to the double-digit IQs
Just at this moment, I got my email notification of the latest Josh Barro post with the title, "President Trump Is Doing Several Things That Strike Me As Unwise."
Oh Josh, never stop being you. So precious.
And did anyone listen to his podcast with the centrists recently? Supposedly about Trump's first week, it was virtually non-stop bashing of the Democrats. What the hell's the matter with these people.
I don't follow Josh Barro or basically anyone in that ideological cluster because I don't think they're serious people, but in my case it boils down to, "I vote Democratic for all federal, most state, and many city offices despite my doubts about their commitment to running the government well, I have earned the right to bitch about that lack of commitment in SB comments."
Well said!
Wow. Did Barro also write a column on "The Palisades Fire Did Several Things That Struck Me as Destructive"?
Come on, it's ironic understatement.
Performative centrism, the desire to be seen as "above the fray," reasonable, "savvy," and emotionally cold. Describes a lot of comments here tbh.
Which is, unironically, great, "performative" notwithstanding!
My conversations are roughly 90% less constructive when I'm emotionally inflamed and more likely to produce the exact opposite of what I want.
I read the post and I think it's very good, and also the title is clearly intentional understatement.
I cannot fathom how a message of "Do your job faithfully to execute lawful directives from the democratically elected President" can be remotely controversial.
The problem is what is lawful and what is not isn't as clear-cut as it seems. Let's say Trump orders the civil service to do something and there's a lawsuit and it goes to the SC, where they rule 5-4 Trump is right. That means 4 SC judges who have spent their lives studying and interpreting laws think Trump is doing something against the law. If they can come to that conclusion but still disagree with their other 5 colleagues, what hope does your average civil servants have of interpreting whether an order is lawful?
You've described lots of directives from Presidents of both parties spanning decades (centuries?). Trump, I'm sure, will push the envelope more often though.
I think there are three appropriate options:
"I think what you are asking me to do doesn't comply with statute XYZ. We can accomplish your goal some other way".
Or do what they ask and let the lawyers hash it out.
Or resign.
These are the three options *any* employee has when asked to do something of dubious legality, whether in the civil service or in the private sector.
Except civil servants are not like employees in the private sector. Some of them take oaths, and all of them owe a first duty to the Constitution and the law as it is written rather than their employer or management. That empowers them, may even compel them, to choose a fourth option: I am not going to do what you tell me, I am going to do what the law tells me, and I have no duty to resign because this displeases you.
It isn't much different, actually. Private sector employees, as law-abiding citizens, also have an obligation not to break the law. And in the case of large employers often will sign an ethics and compliance statement that affirms their commitment to follow the law.
It is usually not different. The distinction I'm thinking of is that in the private sector do nothing is an alternative to break the law, because private businesses are generally not ordered by law to do a task. Government employees can be faced with a choice of being lawfully compelled to do that which their political masters would not want them to do.
Yes, I was one of the people who defended Kim Davis in the narrow sense that "she should just do her job no matter what" is not a viable principle for people who are sworn to uphold the laws! The problem with Davis was just that she was wrong, not that she chose a form of protest that's invalid.
I don’t think they have a duty to suggest alternate ways to accomplish the goal.
I disagree. They have civil service protections so they are protected from unfair firings, and to provide each incoming administration with knowledgeable employees who understand the labyrinth of regulations under which they operate. No incoming administration will understand all the nuances. But in return for those protections, the employees have an ethical duty to provide their knowledge in support of the goals set forth by our duly elected leaders.
This applies equally to the Border Patrol if, as reported, they worked to subvert Biden's directives, as it applies to the executive agencies you might be more sympathetic to.
A lot of folks who work in and adjacent to the Federal government do so because they believe in the missions of the organizations they support. This is especially true of folks in leadership roles but short of being political appointees. There a plenty of lawful things that can be asked of these organizations that are orthogonal to or in contradiction of their stated or intended missions.
The EPA is an excellent example. Many folks who joined the EPA do so because they care deeply about the environment. If they're now asked to draft rules that make it much easier to put waste into drinking water (as a hypothetical example), they may become discouraged even if the new rules are lawful.
I think these are the type of folks MY is targeting in this column.
"lawful directives"
Yes, they're taking that phrase out for a real test drive, aren't they?
Send 21 year old Mr. BigBalls over to Treasury to demand access to all personal payment information and threaten the Treasury folks who dare to push back.
It would help if some Republican members of Congress spoke up and clarified what *they* think is and isn't illegal since it is literally their job to write down what is and isn't a lawful directive.
No one is too worried about the lawful directives.
They actually are worried about a lot of those lawful directives, like the tariffs and pulling out of international agreements.
I understand. But those things will do temporary damage and can be undone, assuming the basic system of democracy holds.
They are nothing in comparison to the unlawful directives, which seek to undermine the whole system. That damage will be lasting.
"You know else who was "just following orders?""
"#notmypresident"
"He only won because of the CORPORATE MEDIA"
Who is saying it is?
Trump has cuties. Everyone knows it. Do you have cuties?
I was promised cheaper eggs.
Can't lower egg prices without breaking some eggs.
It's like Broken Windows theory, but…
Donald, YOU HAD ONE JOB.
Absolutely agree - wrote a piece about this a while ago. It's vital that Trump be made to get blood on his hands by actively violating these norms, not to have people "obey in advance" (however cringe that phrase has become) and give him legitimacy.
How can our side come up with and repeat anything message-wise with confidence if we preemptively call it 'cringe' or call it 'cringe' whenever it is not greeted with with 100% all-around acclamation and gets derision and mocking from somewhere [and it always will, from conservative enemy's at the very least; conversely, their TPs, even ones that are on balance effective, are reliably derided/mocked by millions- but they don't care].
Conservatives' political superpower....and perhaps occasional vulnerability....is their very *lack* of a 'cringe' or 'flinch' reflex in their nervous systems.
I mean fair point, I just guess the Slow Boring message board is to me a place to discuss these things frankly. "Obey in advance" is a phrase I associate with a particular aesthetic of commentary and a particular analysis of the situation (e.g. Synder's) that I don't fully dig, but YMMV.
Also fair point to you for this being a 'safe place' for frankness.
Cuban has been doing good stuff (and has clean hands regarding Docic). He could be a very interesting candidate for President. The conundrum is that if Trump is as big a catastrophe as I fear, that would probably be bad for Cuban's prospects, as it would tend to delegitimize a candidacy based on being a rich, charismatic businessperson. By thermostatic reaction, what the American people might prefer would be a calm, normal, experienced politician (what the promise of Biden was in 2020).
His best chance is if Trump succeeds then? Oy vey.
Man he’d be great if it weren’t for the crypto thing
I feel like there’s a culture on the left (or Resistance) to praise “resign to protest” but idt that’s a helpful culture overall.
Tbh this is another materialization of “politics as a vehicle for emotional satisfaction”…
I mean, resigning in protest does have a long tradition- as a member of said group, i think it'd be better described as "if i don't participate in thing, it'll stop happening".
That being said, yeah, from a tactical perspective, make them fire you, make them make their moves.
The resign in protest model is ages old. It's goal is always to change and or prevent the bad outcome that going along would occur.
Staying and making them fire me for not going along also is ages old. Neither of these ideas are at all left coded. Both are means to an end, not the end themselves.
There was a discussion here a few days back about civic virtue and the concept of honor. Both these actions have long been considered the "honorable" thing to do. Unless you denigrate as just another means of emotional satisfaction, this should be seen as something more serious than that.
I would expect 'Resign in protest' works best when you're asked to do something blatantly illegal/immoral and you resign to call attention to the thing that you expect most people will _agree_ with you is illegal/immoral.
If most of Trump's supporters think "culling the bureaucracy" is a good thing, then you're not calling attention to anything unpopular, you're just making his job easier and potentially giving up a future opportunity to keep things working right.
Yeah, I think resigning in protest works best when you're actually somebody the person you're resigning against likes personally or admires. If you're not, resigning in protest does nothing and probably is even beneficial to your enemy.
yeah, I agree and sorry I phrased it poorly.
Also, i think the other questions are
- is the person trying to quit are essentially to the job (i.e. without this person, the whole organization does not work)?
- how caplable is the replacement is?
That said, the goal of Trump is not necessary functional government, idk how these viewpoints are relevant in this case
Yes, there's nothing wrong in principle with resigning in protest. The question here is just, which tactic under present circumstances will be more effective at preventing or frustrating the wrongful acts that Trump is attempting.
I'll take resigning in protest any day over Christopher Wray's "okey dokey sir."
Thank you for articulatng this and sorry I phrased it poorly overall.
I could be very wrong but what I feel and am concerned a little bit these days is resign in protest is associated with "being badass" and receives an applaud or attention and as a result, there's a temptation to go that route even if it's not the best mean to the end.
And I feel likt this is happening more on the left than the right (think it's mostly bc most institution is staffed by highly educated ppl but could be other reasons)
Part of the resign in protest, or threaten to resign in protest, is that it assumes the person in charge is capable of shame or at least being influenced by their public image. This actually happened with Trump, probably more than once, but the easiest for me to remember was in January 2021 when he wanted to put a flunky in charge of DOJ. There was a credible threat of mass resignations, and Trump backed down---ahh the good old days.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/23/1107217243/former-doj-officials-detail-threatening-resign-en-masse-trump-meeting
Mike Duncan said on his Revolutions podcast, "History is made by those who show up." Resigning means you no longer show up.
I can't emphasize that stock futures being down enormously right now is one of the best things can happen right now. When I'm agreeing with the WSJ editorial board, that should tell us something.
I bring this up because market reaction might the only thing can change us from this really dangerous course. Matt brought him up, but Trump possibly threatening Jay Powell if he doesn't cut rates is a real possibility here. And the only thing I think that could stop him is if the market tanks. He craves the approval of Wall Street titans and they are not going to be best pleased with him if tariffs persist and market tanks.
For all the focus on Musk and lesser extent Bezos and Zuckerburg we can sometimes forget that lots of very powerful and rich people are not part of the "bro"ligarch tent. There are tons of GOP congressmen and senators who represent districts and states that are tremendously harmed by this.
I bring up because I still have to say as loud as I can; GOP officials have agency. What's galling is that they've demonstrated this throughout the Trump era for stuff like tax cuts. They can actually do something about this anytime they want.
The good news is Powell might be unique in not giving any fucks about Trump. I loved his simple "No." answer when asked back in November. I don't think Trump will have any influence on him but also pretty clear the 2026 nomination is going to be a mess and come down to a contentious near party-live vote when Trump nominates some stooge.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/fed-chair-trump-remove-trump-influence-interest-rates/story?id=115636961
Interesting this just came out. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/03/in-a-switch-trump-approves-feds-decision-to-hold-interest-rates-steady-.html
Someone definitely got in his ear and said you have to say something to at least somewhat appease the market.
Now of course this. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/02/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
What a completely stupid way to do anything. Also notes there are meeting scheduled for this afternoon with Trudeau.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump declares victory and cancels the tariff.
Meanwhile, Trudeau declares his attempt to allow no more than 19 kg of fentanyl to go from Canada to the US in the future.
P.S. Just this very moment I see that Trump has paused the Mexico tariffs.
Given the amount of fentanyl coming from Canada it's such an easy "victory" for Trump for him to crow 6 months from now about how his "tough" tarrifs has meant little to no fentanyl coming across the border from up north.
All so very stupid. Also another reminder how much of his success is the almost complete supplication of right wing media.
I know we continue to debate why Biden was so unpopular. But can't be emphasized enough how much more criticism him (or any Democrat) will get from other Democrats, left of center media and left wing groups than Trump will no matter what happens.
Being anti-abortion is one of the supposedly most important parts of the GOP policy platform. Trump comes out (at least rhetorically. Different story with various LA and TX AG(s)) as not wanting to further restrict abortion access...and crickets in the right wing press or right wing generally.
The contrast with say Israel-Palestine is just astonishing.
People think we have a two party system. Silly people. We have a three party system: the Republicans, Democrats 1 and Democrats 2. And the fighting is much more vicious between the latter two and their supporters than between them and the first one.
How often can you go to this well?
And does anyone really believe Canada is complicit or even indifferent to fentanyl trafficking? If this all effectively ends today with bullshit "concessions" what does it even mean?
Surprise surprise. Another 30 day halt to tariffs. So does that mean we go through this whole dance again in 30 days?
As an OG Alan Greenspan fanboi, Powell's response back then thrilled my heart -- Make Federal Reserve Chairs Great Again!
You know, when I worked in public health for about a decade, I sat and watched the FDA miss the youth vaping epidemic while touting generational smoking success. I worked with the CDC as they rebranded a painkiller abuse epidemic to an opioid epidemic, but then didn't do anything to solve it and actively pushed the opioid issue to the black market of fentanyl, synthetics, and heroin by cracking down on pill mill drs and then do nothing else. I watched the WH and NIH fuck up the COVID comms so bad that the backlash to taking the vaccine reached over 50%, and was told our media-derived numbers were impossibly high and not real.
I've said before there needs to be a US wide, public CDP of sorts to help with program and agency accountability. But more than that our bureaucracy does need to be kicked in the teeth with at least one example of a modern organization. If DOGE can rework even one agency to modern standards that would be enough to start the snowball.
The old saw is that every agency wants to be second to innovation - first is risk, third is late. All you need is one
What you've described points to individual examples of when the federal government should have done a better job, or avoided mistakes. It's not clear how reducing state capacity accomplishes this. Is Musk pressuring people to quit government service only if they're complicit in some gross, harmful public error?
That's not what the papers are reporting. Also, the people most responsible for policy formulation and implementation are generally political appointees, and as such have always been fire-able.
In Musk's view, civil service is itself a gross harmful public error.
Yep. Seems pretty Randian.
It's a bad cliche now but there really was a moment when all these fake* Libertarian idiots would publicly recommend The Fountainhead - like this bozo: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/hodinkee-radio-episode-21-matt-jacobson
* please just go back and listen to them cry about bailing out SVB.
I read The Fountainhead before my acne cleared up. A pretty good fucking book, if I recall correctly. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand....oh vey.
There's quite a lot of brushfire to burn without harming the core trees fruiting value for citizens across our bureaucratic agencies. I understand the 5-alarm fire people are feeling at the unorthodox tactics here (to put it mildly) but the goal is radical cost reform not erasement. I will hold my critiques about diminished state capacity until we see the other side, because in a word, outside defense and intel, what state capacity?
If the question is “what state capacity?” then let’s look at the examples you mentioned. The youth vaping epidemic is clearly a problem, but we have actually been enacting regulations that begin to get a control on it within a decade or so of when it started, quite unlike the original cigarette smoking epidemic. With painkiller abuse and the opioid epidemic, again this is being insufficiently addressed, but still much better than the epidemics of gin in the 1700s of cocaine and heroin in the late 19th century. With vaccine hesitancy, there were many mistakes (some of them intentionally amplified by elected officials) but again, we got a new vaccine within a year, and within a year of its introduction we got higher usage than with the annual flu vaccine.
There are absolutely many problems with state capacity in public health. But if someone *claims* they want to fix them, I would like to see them at least propose something positive, rather than just cut, cut, cut in ways that jeopardize the basic gains we’ve fought so hard for over the past century.
In 2014 when I was working with the FDA and watching the youth vaping rates skyrocket, they were actively celebrating ending youth smoking. Catching it and 'beginning to get a control on it' within a decade of not when it started, but when they classified it as an epidemic is just as large of a miss as COVID. Gen Z was already addicted beyond repair.
The opioid epidemic was functionally made worse by pushing the issue to the black market and out of public health systems, and only is starting to curve downwards because (a) tons of people have died, and (b) producers are struggling to produce high potency like they were doing before. It has nothing to do with US Fed intervention at all, in any way.
I agree on the need for reform, absolutely
Vaping is like a million times better for you than smoking, so that's an unqualified win. You seem like a person with an axe to grind and it's clouding your judgement.
6% of kids age 13-17 use e-cigs. 4% of middle schoolers. We lost a whole decade 2014-2024 until its started to decrease. The FDA did nothing despite getting hundreds of millions of dollars per year to tackle the issue. Similar to opioids they threw up their hands and waited for the issue to resolve itself over a mountain of health issues costing further tens of billions. So yes I am upset at them and have an axe to grind over being personally threatened by the FDAs OIG for calling it out.
>but the goal is radical cost reform not erasement<
Why is "radical" cost reform needed? If we want to save serious cash, we need to look at retirement programs and healthcare. Full stop. That is where the real money is. We have hundreds of thousands *fewer* federal civil servants than we had 35 years ago, and we run a public sector that is one of the smallest in the rich world.
C'mon, these people have been promising a war on the deep state for years now. Well, this is what that war looks like. Don't fall for con.
Sure, but the public sector has been moated with systems integrators who have shielded them from modernization. I was told to my face in 2018-2020 by more than one Fed CIO that despite exec orders, the Fed Gov will never be able to do zero trust and that only big tech can do it. Here we are a few years later, its widely used around the industry, and not a single agency is fully transitioned, and our bureaucratic systems are hacked to kingdom come.
I agree we need civil service protections, but on the other hand we need functional bureaucratic systems. We have neither.
When I worked with HHS on ads campaigns at Google, at any given time there were over two dozen public health campaign running, from HIV/AIDS to Flu to Zika to Opioids etc you name it they run it. The thing is, each department runs their own research program in order to determine target markets. So back in 2014-18 if you were living in Huntington, WV you were a part of every single one of these two dozen ish campaigns target market, not to mention whatever other federal programs were going on. So you would get ads for each which conflicted with each other, then each program would do their own years-long evaluation based on control & exposed experiments, and then come to some conclusion for the next effort.
The people of Huntington saw millions of ads telling them how poor, sick, and needy they were every single day like it was the week before an election. Who knows what came out the other side but every single program was extremely tainted in its analysis based on the innumerable other overlapping efforts targeting the same people.
I answered an IDIQ once recommending to consolidate the first-party data around these initiatives, and then turn around and provide that data back to individual programs so they could do better, be more efficient, and perform more accurate analysis. I never even got down-selected with that approach.
Cancelling half those contracts and consolidating that work would be seen as a large diminishment in civil service work, money spent, and "state capacity" on paper. But the people impacted by each dollar would see far better results with a unified approach.
I've been in orgs that have done radical consolidations and pivots. It's like lighting a brushfire to help growth. Everyone who has worked in tech has seen something similar. Reorgs happen for a reason, and I'll hold my breath before I judge outcomes.
You have some basic facts wrong here, for what it's worth.
"I sat and watched the FDA miss the youth vaping epidemic while touting generational smoking success."
This isn't true. FDA tried to regulate e-cigarettes as soon as they hit the US market, but the courts overruled them due to statutory interpretations at the time.
"I worked with the CDC as they rebranded a painkiller abuse epidemic to an opioid epidemic, but then didn't do anything to solve it and actively pushed the opioid issue to the black market of fentanyl, synthetics, and heroin by cracking down on pill mill drs and then do nothing else."
CDC has no regulatory authority at all with respect to drugs. What are you claiming they should have done sooner to crack down on pill mills or doctors?
"US wide, public CDP" already exists and is pointless, for what it's worth. Everyone ignores it.
I was there so I'm sorry you are reaching for comfort where there is none. Here's my story on the FDA if you want to read the order of events -- https://open.substack.com/pub/socialdawn/p/the-most-valuable-dataset-the-government
They only started doing anything after they waited years for the then-current budget cycle focused on cigarillos to end. By then it was far too late.
Here's my case study with the CDC on the rebrand -- https://web.archive.org/web/20241210233013/https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/opioid-awareness-campaign/
The CDC gives moneys and data to states so it's all CDC funds flowed through grants, which were tailored at community listening and response programs and pill mill drs. That was the way the funds were directed.
There is no US wide CDP what are you even referring to? The closest thing is GSAs DAP program which just puts Google analytics on websites and creates once annual PDFs.
Just because you were there at some point doesn't mean you're wrong. And congrats, you're wrong!
FDA lost a court case with respect to regulating e-cigarettes in 2010.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dc-circuit/1593752.html
CDC had no appropriations to address opioids until 2015. It's not clear to me what you expect them to do to address the issue before they have funding or staff to do anything.
Google the Government Performance Results Act, the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act, and the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018. Each agency already has measurable goals.
They lost a case because they narrowly defined their own policies to their own detriment. Youre the case for me! They reversed it themselves in 2016 by changing their own rules. It had to argue that e cigs were medical devices because it had painted itself into its own corner. It had to twist itself into legal knots to get it out it with the Deeming Rule.
The CDC had tons of appropriations, it was just not called the opioid epidemic. I ran $10M+ ad campaigns around painkillers for years prior, it just wasnt centralized because (surprise surprise) no one at CDC had the bright idea to look at the results of their own policies. The news reporter in west virginia who broke the story won a literal pulitzer based on finding that WV had prescribed "780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills." I'll give you one guess as to two major sources where public health authorities could find that information. Hint -- inside their own walls
Lmao on the performance acts. Bidens literal second goal of the PMA was around customer experience, which flopped miserably as they decided they could reinvent the field rather than use tried and true methods....like using a CDP. None of these have even a whiff of CDP or modern personalization tech in them at all. Name a single one. I'll wait.
I'm sorry, but you keep showcasing how you don't have a good handle on the timeline, facts, or policy issues. Let's just stick with e-cigs.
You say FDA missed e-cigs as a public health problem.
This is flatly not true. E-cigs entered the US market in 2006, and FDA immediately began seizing them as unregulated medical devices a few months later. This is consistent with FDA's existing statutory authority at the time and how other countries still continue to regulate e-cigs. Since you claimed FDA dropped the ball on e-cigs, your initial argument is dead at this point; FDA began addressing the issue in months.
"They lost a case because they narrowly defined their own policies to their own detriment. Youre the case for me! They reversed it themselves in 2016 by changing their own rules. It had to argue that e cigs were medical devices because it had painted itself into its own corner. It had to twist itself into legal knots to get it out it with the Deeming Rule."
This is another misread of the policy history here.
In 2009, Congress passes the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This grants new statutory authority to FDA to regulate tobacco and smokeless tobacco products.
E-cigarette companies sue and claim e-cigs should be regulated as tobacco products under the new regulatory pathway created by the 2009 law.
The courts agree in 2010. You claim "FDA painted themselves into a corner," but this can't be true. There was no corner for FDA to paint themselves into until Congress passed the alternative regulatory pathway for tobacco products in 2009. Following the passage of the 2009 law and court rulings, FDA issued regulations that implement the 2009 law. This is what the "Deeming Rule" is. The people at FDA are not stupid for issuing rules after a new law is passed.
The glaring issue here is that you pretend that these (a) worked as intended and (b) worked at all. FDA in the 2000s just wanted to apply the same regulations as cigs, didnt see them as connected to youth, and didnt take them seriously as an issue at all. They did no advertising or public health outreach until well into ~2015-16, when they were actively being criticized by the WSJ and NYT for dropping the ball. This is all easily recorded history. They pushed back on any notion at the time that they had a real issue and the FDA commissioner Hamburg at the time blamed digital media companies for the rise in uptake rather than obviously the addictive nature of e-cigs.
Youre strawmanning the argument here. My argument was and is that they did nothing to prevent the rise in the youth vaping epidemic until it was literally an epidemic, and they didnt. Trying to classify them as medical devices to fall under that reg does nothing for youth smoking even if it were successful, but of course it wasnt.
Youre showing exactly why there was a decade+ of incompetence leading to 6% of HSers smoking for 10+ years and tens if not hundreds of billions spent on medical intervention for youth. Idk how in holy hell you can sit there and pretend that was the FDA working as intended. The people at the FDA CTP were, in fact, stupid and told me repeatedly that (a) the rise in data around use I was sharing was not relevant or useful, (b) I'd be investigated by OIG if I continued sharing it, and (c) that the eventual rise in uptake of e-cigs by youth was actually digital media/tech companies fault.
Its all so absurd, the more absurd thing is you letting them off the hook for overseeing the whole thing
From what I've seen, the odds of Trump's people changing agencies so they produce better results is zero. They clearly don't care how the agencies work or what would help them with their mission. They seem uninterested in learning anything about the machine they are smashing repeatedly with a metal pipe in the hope it breaks.
My prediction is we will come out of this with agencies that work moderately worse. They will be more risk averse (since the punishment for any screw-up under Trump's people will be worse), have lower capacity (since Trump is undermining their ability to do things) and will be incapable of new initiatives (since they'll be constantly responding to a sea of poorly thought out EOs that get reworded and rescinded three days later).
Which is sad! I would like our agencies to do better. Anger that they don't is warranted. But what we are getting isn't repair or rebuilding, it's demolition.
We will see. I for one think that its actually quite low hanging fruit to find the 10-15% of every single federal dollar that goes to Medicare, Medicaid, and SBA that are lost to fraud, waste, and abuse. It just requires doing some cross-agency data work that Feds are absolutely against doing ever.
We will see!
My mother and maternal grandfather were career civil servants. I might have gone that way, but for my distaste for security clearances and drug tests. I did work for the federal judiciary for two years, one of the few professional federal jobs you can get without submitting your private affairs to your employers’ scrutiny.
I see the federal civil service as a group of conscientious, risk averse rule followers. It wastes far too much time worrying about typos, but it’s big enough and powerful enough to keep most things pretty safe. I would like to prune it just the right amount.
Fortunately "just the right amount" is an easily agreed upon medium
Nietzsche did okay philosophizing with a hammer, but normally I prefer surgeons using scalpels and butchers using cleavers.
That's why Congress exists
agreed. But I would also argue that much of what the administrative state does wasn't required by congress but has built up over decades by the executive branch.
Wait, but earlier you were the one saying Congress can't be the ones making the rules about whether and how civil servants can be fired, that has to be up to the executive branch. Now you're saying that the executive branch wrongly built up the power of the administrative state. So Congress is supposed to define what the agencies do and the executive is supposed to decide how to staff them? Or is it that Congress does the hiring and the Executive does the firing?
“but for my distaste for security clearances and drug tests”. What? One of these things is not like the other in a potentially interesting way!
All infringements on utter libertinism are bad, even if utter libertinism causes society to collapse the literal day after David Abbott dies.
Not wanting to be drug tested is “utter libertinism?” No, it’s called pluralism.
Clearly was talking about the security clearance.
It’s reasonable to not want to take drug tests, but requiring a clean drug test to get a security clearance has always been a bad idea!
Why? Because people who are otherwise capable sometimes fail them?
Do you think it increases their vulnerability to blackmail to have to take the drug test? I see that argument if you can "cheat" the test, and now your drug use is a secret that can be held over you, in which case assuming there's no _other_ reason to block it you should allow it (see - homosexuality preventing security clearances), but I would think those are more difficult to cheat so they'd be less vulnerable to this.
As a homosexual user of cannabis and alcohol, it has long seemed to me that it would be reasonable to treat all three of those traits on a par, rather than treating one or two of them as disqualifying and the other as irrelevant as long as it doesn’t take over your life.
So you'd tolerate drug tests but not for cannabis?
(I'm inclined to agree with you that cannabis and alcohol seem roughly on par)
Quite possibly, though I think there’s more questions to ask here about the details.
While I will never judge anyone for acting in their own best interest, ordinary people taking action in extraordinary circumstances is how heroes are born, and how they are remembered by history. Look at the ones who bailed because it got tough-Charlie Dent, Paul Ryan, Jeff Flake-and how much influence and change has that affected? Take a stand, do not comply. Be a hero.
What could Paul Ryan have achieved by taking a stand? A lower capital gains rate? Fewer calories for kids on SNAP?
Misses the point.
To be admirable, taking a stand generally requires a deeper purpose than stand taking itself.
Paul Ryan was one of the few that actually cared about fixing budget deficits and entitlements. He's a hero
I am already exhausted by all the bullshit. I am just trying to keep doing my job.
This is somewhat orthogonal to your point in this piece, but I think there is also a need to cultivate a related ethos of "going down trying" when it comes to tough election campaigns. It is vastly preferable for Sherrod Brown or Jon Tester to campaign hard and lose than preemptively retire before a tough race as Manchin did. Especially if you idiosyncratically have the highest WAR for your individual seat. I have such massive respect for Tim Ryan for willingly jumping into a race vs Vance he knew he was likely to lose but had the highest expected value of winning over all other possible candidates.
To be fair, Manchin is 77. Not wanting to bother running again at that age is reasonable, and perhaps even to-be-encouraged, even in seats like his.
Jesus he is older than I thought. Ok yes good rule of thumb.
Also, don't be a Resistance Saboteur. That just makes it easier for Trump to cull the civil service, and provides an easy excuse for those Heritage Foundation interns to be MAGA saboteurs is the next Democratic administration.
Agree, need to be as above board as possible in any questioning of legality of any directives. Preserving regular administrative rule of law is much more important than preserving any particular political policies.
This whole thing is so weird to me. Can anyone remember issues with "resistance saboteurs" during previous transitions. Policy disagreements happen of course, but I can't remember Bush complaining the civil service was engaged in active sabotage.
Removing all the "W" keys from the keyboards in the Clinton transition? I vaguely remember something like that, but not clear how widespread it was.
That was pretty juvenile, but I believe it was just in the White House and it was outgoing staffers who wouldn't still be serving.
I mean, people who work in the WH and would have done this are political appointees and not career civil servants, so this example is somewhat moot. I think this is also of a completely different class of activity than intentionally undermining major policy initiatives.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250118202527/https://americafirstpolicy.com/assets/uploads/files/Tales_from_the_Swamp-_How_Federal_Bureaucrats_Resisted_President_Trump_-_Revided_1.8.2025.pdf
I've seen this, and I'm not saying it is inaccurate, but Sherk is one of the architects of P2025 and not a reliable source in my view. I'm willing to concede this is functionally an ad hominem argument, but I think a reasonable person who has observed the past couple of weeks might reasonably conclude Sherk is not a great source.
Sherk is also intellectually dishonest, for what it's worth. A lot of his writings have circular citations (he makes a claim and cites his own work where he makes the same claim rather than providing proof for a claim). This may not be a deal breaker for you either, but his specific examples are somewhat risible. To pick a few:
"Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) career staff circumvented President Trump’s hiring freeze, which was issued soon after he first took office, by crossing out new hires’ start dates on their hiring paperwork. Staff used Sharpie pens to adjust the start dates retroactively to January 19, 2017—the day before President Trump took office"
So there was no hiring freeze when the hiring was completed. Hiring takes months.
"Department of Labor (DOL) regulatory staff intentionally delayed producing a
departmental priority regulation. A competent private sector attorney could have
produced a draft regulation in two to three weeks. The team of about a dozen career staff claimed they needed a year to do so—a pace that amounted to each attorney in the unit writing less than one line of text a day."
If this were true, it might be damning. But's it's much more believable that the attorneys said it would take a year to complete a draft rulemaking (publishing stuff to the Federal Register Notice and waiting 60 days) then it would take a year to write some words on a page.