The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
Didn't a democracy vote in the people that are saying they want to remove some agencies? Isn't that also how the agencies came to be in the first place?
You are right, but america use a two party system, there were only two options, and those options differed in many ways, it is difficult to say if "removing some agencies" was what the people that voted wanted, or if they just preferred that candidate despite them wanting to remove some agencies.
This is a pretty weak argument. Blaming the two-party system might feel good, but I don't think it gives us a better understanding of what happened in this election. People voted for the guy at the top of the ticket, and he was pretty clear about wanting to get rid of some federal agencies. I think we have to conclude that people were receptive to his message.
My hot take is that the two-party system isn't anywhere near as bad as people think it is. In countries with multi-party systems, parties often have to form coalitions in order to govern. In countries with two-party systems, parties have to do most of that coalition forming before the election. That's why we see far-left and center-left politicians in the Democratic party instead of having viable left wing parties.
One way or another, we get a coalition government. Is it better for those coalitions to be formed before the election or after? If it happens before the election, the electorate can see the results in time to change their decision. If it happens after the election, the fringe parties' arguments probably get discussed more, but there's no guarantee those parties will be part of the governing coalition.
you are right in it being a weak argument in this situation, and I'll refrain from arguing against a two party system in this comment.
What I should have said, is that as an outsider: I see lots of interviews with people who state that they are going to vote for trump (at time of interview), and they all seem to pick and choose from the things that trump says, some they take at face value, and others they consider to be just "the way he talk", campaign speech, or something along those lines.
Now, I don't know, maybe the majority of the people that voted for him actually want to dismantle institutions, maybe they don't and just saw it as an exaggerated way of saying that there should be some cutbacks. I don't know, I just don't think that it is an obvious conclusion from the result.
> In countries with multi-party systems, parties often have to form coalitions in order to govern. In countries with two-party systems, parties have to do most of that coalition forming before the election.
Exactly. This is really obvious but no one seems to acknowledge it. I even think the coalition dynamic can become a huge distraction from governance on its own. Could we think of tweaks to the process to make things better? Sure. But a wholesale rethink or uncritical mimicry is unlikely to produce something better.
Democracy isn't as simple as that. When you get 49.9% of the vote and can form a government, that isn't carte blanche to do anything and everything. A long-lived democracy depends on governments that take care not to offend the voters who voted against.
Angela Merkel was great at that — even when she had a majority anyway, she'd take care to act in such a fashion that ~half of the opposition voters approved.
Also hard to ignore him nominating several of the authors of, and people involved in, p2025 to his cabinet.
A lot of people who weren't paying attention are going to be saying "I didn't know", "How could've I known", "Why didn't anyone tell me", in the coming months and years.
It's unfortunate so many will suffer at the hands of the disengaged and the misinformed / poorly informed voters of this country.
I'd like to think they'll pay attention after this, but I thought the same thing last time around.
they're literally talking about deleting agencies, which was explictly mentioned in the plan.
several of the authors have already received / been earmarked for appointments.
if someone says "i'm going to blow up a building", and then starts buying a ton of dynamite, it's pretty reasonable to assume they're gonna blow up that building.
What do you mean? There are people who wrote parts of Project 2025 who will be in the next government, or do you think the Heritage Foundation has no ties to the future Trump government at all?
The Republican Party Platform says: "We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run."
Trump also mentioned it frequently in his speeches: " 'I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,' he said in September during a rally in Wisconsin. "
That platform has some puzzling things in it, like saying that if they win the White House and majorities in Congress they will quickly "Fight for and protect Social Security and Medicare with no cuts, including no changes to the retirement age".
That's puzzling because every time in the past few years that anyone in Congress has tried to take up addressing the projected insolvency of the Social Security trust fund in ~2033 Republicans have rejected any approach other than raising the retirement age.
Democracy isn't just blind voting. The votes mean nothing if people don't know what the candidates stand for. Manifestos outlining intent and reasoning are part of the process but so is explaining what a policy is intended to achieve as it is being enacted. Without knowing the intended outcome, how can people judge whether it succeeded or not and whether to vote for this candidate again next time?
Assuming you’re genuinely asking, this is a tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy who was not on any ballot this election, but was since appointed to a position that the elected candidate Donald Trump created as part of a net new agency he plans to create during his presidency.
>>The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason.
>>Has that changed?
'that' 'reason' for any government is to ensure its own survival till eternity. Though eternity might not be possible. Its really more on the lines that governments exist to ensure their own survival, and the survival of their interests. Its often a misunderstanding that Government work for the people, they just work for themselves. To that extent, unless the government is going down due to this very reason, Im guessing it doesn't make any sense to chop departments whole sale this way.
Another factor is budgets just don't work the way these people imagine, its not that budgets would reduce or that they would return some money back to the treasury. These sort of actions just mean that budgeting just goes on as is, the money that now is saved will be used up by the other departments. Im guessing the armed forces.
These people don’t want to understand anything. They also don’t want to change anything. They just want the appearance of a steamroller so they can raise more money. Rinse and repeat.
I believe that the agencies have lost the trust of the people. This is what happens under bad and corrupt leadership, e.g. forever wars based on a lie, a person with dementia at the top, a candidate for President with no primaries.
The danger in this situation is that the DOGE will dismantle the safety mechanisms of the state, some of which depend on the state inertia, i.e. it's much harder to execute a coup when there are 4 agencies with overlapping duties.
Time will tell, but it is an end of something for sure IMHO.
I think they are using the already existing potential, you can cause some effects, sure, but not of this magnitude. No one is ever held responsible, even after truly astonishing and costly failures. At the same time there's that alienating gibberish coming from the other side. It's a natural reaction to reject it, only amplified by opportunistic actors. But hell, we might be looking at the fall of the Republic and the rise of an Empire, perhaps with a Civil War in between, not sure what to make of it yet.
I am skeptical that Elon/Vivek will actually cut any Federal spending as the only administration to actually reduce the number of Federal gov jobs was President Clinton from 1992 to 1997.
What I find very interesting is that in the early 1990s when the deficit hit 4.5% of GDP (1992) Congress actually viewed it as a major issue and decided to cut spending but now the deficit is above 6%+ of GDP and reducing spending is an extremely controversial topic.
While true, the larger the ship, the more difficult it is to turn. I think the idea is that for every salaried individual, you have support staff, equipment, benefits, etc that come along with them. It’s also another cog in the chain of work that needs to be done.
For example, there are at least 1200 positions that need to be confirmed. It can take half the presidency to staff a full cabinet. I think we can agree that’s excessive.
The idea that we've lived in this "deficits don't matter" fantasy for the last 25 years (45 years?) is that we have a situation in which nobody ever thinks about why the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Aside from simple path dependency, all of the foundational reasons why it became the reserve currency are hardly relevant any longer. So, we sit here driving the debt car as fast as we can, with no idea what is in front of us. Sure, it might work out, but the fact that many financial analysts don't put any risk premium on treasuries at this point just terrifies me.
There are no clear details about what DOGE will alter. All the information we have so far amounts to outrage-bait one-liners. Where and how are they deciding to make cuts, and which agencies are they planning to change? Cutting is not intrinsically a good or bad idea, but everything I’ve read about this so far makes DOGE seem anti-intellectual.
You say this as if Trump will also not be in control of both sides of Congress. All it takes to make this a department of the government is a vote in Congress.
And most of the members of congress (all of the house, 1/3 of the senate)will be up for election in 2 years. Let’s see if they are up for cutting social security and medicare when they have to face the voters just two years later.
Let’s break this down. Payments on the debt (10% of budget) are already off the table. SS, Health Insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, etc) and defense represent about 58% of the budget. If we eliminate everything else, we are going after things like welfare, the VA, and veterans benefits, as well as subsidies to a variety of businesses. Bottom line, even if there wasn’t an economic impact, there will be some very pissed-off powerful constituents.
At the end of the day, this whole process shows that Musk and Ramaswamy are clowns.
Unless I have missed something (always a real possibility to be fair) there are also no clear details about what DOGE is, what its powers or lack thereof are, what its staffing is, or what its actual processes will be.
We’ll find out more when the actual Trump administration starts I guess, but so far it seems like a broad concept that two guys can use for tweets.
> there are also no clear details about what DOGE is, what its powers or lack thereof are
It's (edit: going to be after Innauguration Day) a Presidential Task Force
Presidential Task Forces have zero power, as they can only give recommendations.
All this hyperventilating over DOGE is distracting from actual issues to worry about - like the upcoming showdown between Senate GOP Leadership and the Executive Branch over a number of confirmations.
>All this hyperventilating over DOGE is distracting from actual issues to worry about
It's not hyperventilating. It may start as a task force but it can easily and quickly be upgraded to a full-on department of the federal government by Congress.
> it can easily and quickly be upgraded to a full-on department
It cannot easily be converted. The house margin is razor thin now that Gaetz and Stefanik gave up their seats for nominations, and filibuster-able.
And Senate leadership is status quo GOP with Sen Thune as Senate Majorty leader, and his allies Grassley and Cornyn, as well as shakey Senators like Collin and Murkowski reducing that majority, and the Senate is still filibuster-able as well.
And given the amount of controversy over a number of Secretary choices, it'll take 6-9 months alone just to go through the Senate Confirmation backlog.
Where were you for the last 8 years? If there's one thing the GOP is great at, it's coalescing around votes. Even with the thin margins, there are ways for them to achieve their goals quickly. I think you're not giving them enough credit here...
It is only the Senate which has the filibuster, and it merely exists as a Senate rule. It can be removed with a simple majority vote, though I believe rule changes must occur at the beginning of the new Congress.
That may be a moot point with regard to cabinet positions should the incoming Republican Senate go along with Trump's request for recess appointments, though.
> It is only the Senate which has the filibuster, and it merely exists as a Senate rule. It can be removed with a simple majority vote, though I believe rule changes must occur at the beginning of the new Congress.
Rule changes can occur any time, but except for the initial adoption of the rules by a majority vote by each House at the opening of each Congress are, themselves, subject to the rules adopted by that House for that Congress, which may impose additional process.
House can de facto filibuster in the sense that a 3 rep majority will inevitably lead to clashes internally, as every rep in the GOP absolutely will use this as an excuse to get concessions. This happened everytime this happens.
> It can be removed with a simple majority vote
It absolutely can, but both sides steer away from doing so due to situations like this - either party inevitably becomes the minority as some point in the Senate, so Senate leadership in both parties prefer to maintain it.
> That may be a moot point with regard to cabinet positions should the incoming Republican Senate go along with Trump's request for recess appointments, though
And that's my point. With Thune as Senate majority leader, Recess Appointments are basically moot.
The whole point of Recess Appointments is to undermine the power of the Senate, which much of the Senate obviously opposes.
Well, its a department that literally does not exist yet because the regime that wants to build it isn't in power yet. So, maybe have a bit of patience before breaking out the name-calling.
I think DOGE does exist, it just is a non-government entity advising the incoming administration with a deceptive name that makes it sound like a government agency rather than a privileged private lobbying group.
Most of them aren't named like government entities, given a verified-government-entity greycheck on Twitter, have their leadership announced by the incoming President elect, recruit on the explicit premise of being part of Administration policy, and have public confusion as to whether they are a government department or something else.
You’ve listed indicators that suggests it has a higher probability of becoming a formalized office of some kind, higher likelihood that key decision makers truly believe in establishing it, etc.
I like the framing of agencies as task forces, because it gives clear goals, then it prepares people for knowing it’s temporary. It also provides an off ramp to resist a situation where admin and bureaucracy always grows.
I’d argue the regulatory unit ought to be temporary while enforcement is ongoing. Permanent organizations are just as ineffective. They did nothing to protect our food supply from ingredients banned in other countries. They did nothing to stop microplastics from taking over the world.
So exactly what are they good for while sitting around pontificating for years on end?
You’re arguing these orgs should have full support and backing of the government to exert total control (“do something about microplastics” and “banning specific imports”) but because we either failed to give them or they failed to use such powers (“did nothing to stop microplastics”) that we should remove all of their power and backing?
Look, I’m all for addressing plastics and unhealthy foods, but is that really the outcome you’re predicting from the organization being discussed and the people running it?
Their words and past actions lead me to believe they are the “pro plastics” “pro unhealthy foods” people, and their effort, rather than some altruistic motivation you ascribe them, is in fact to remove the last vestiges of guardrails, however weak and inept, against them promoting those sorts of things to an even greater degree.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We have the safest food supply in the entire history of humanity and there still improvements to go, but just removing all that progress because it wasn't perfect seems insane to me.
You want more things banned? Removing all existing regulations will not get you there.
Sorry, I didn't mean to remove regulations. I meant that maybe the regulatory side of the agencies should meet as needed with enforcement being the thing that is perpetual.
Generally the regulatory side is made up of scientists and data analysis folks that build data to back regulatory actions and ensure they're working as intended. How do you envision the regulatory side working? Wait for congress to say, "Hey, look into this?" and then spin up a few thousand temps to crunch numbers and figure out a action? Often times it takes years to build a regulatory stance. If so, how do you forsee holding actions accountable if there isn't a persistent level of folks validating areas of concern across the nation?
I totally understand that the government feels bloated and we could cut costs in plenty of areas, but I think it's way more effective to apoint people into leadership positions that can take a real deep look at things and actually cut what makes sense. Any sort of rapid deep cuts is only going to harm us as a society and likely not actually save that much money. No matter how much money you saved, when you spin up something new that is basically starting from scratch, you're going to spend way more then just fixing what exists.
I think it's the classic coder's dilemma, The code's shit, do I refactor it in place or do I replace it from scratch. Any small or even medium sized project, replacing it from scratch could be the right thing to do, but when you get into large projects, replacing it is just not the right decision if you're trying to save money.
I do like your idea of temporary funding as an automatic off ramp. But my experience is that jurisdiction that have things like temporary levies just end up with voters blindly renewing those levies. Why? Because they’re told a scary story of how the basic services they rely on will be first to go (instead of the agencies cutting out wasteful or non critical spending first). If there’s no choice or competition, you end up being forced to pay for them because of these games.
Even if they’re not temporary though, agencies should have clear goals, metrics, and be held accountable to those. For example how many times have we seen wasteful spending on opaque homelessness programs on the west coast with zero results?
In my opinion we need to rethink how agencies are funded. Why do we need to give a bloated government a big tax check instead of having agencies work hard to win customers and charge them fees? Agencies should also (sometimes but not always) be forced to face competition from alternative private providers to keep the pressure of competition on.
As always I'm putting my money on "nothing ever happens", but I do think it's probably good that we have a serious discussion on what exactly the purpose various agencies serve and refine their missions and processes to actually support them. Will it happen, probably not, but I can dream.
There's a ton of information about every agency out there, but people don't read about them. One of the benefits of government is that it allows people to ignore all the details that make modern life possible.
On the tech stack, it's like claiming that everyone should understand assembly. It's useful for some folks to know assembly, but the vast majority of folks don't care. They just want to use the stuff that's built upon it.
Why anyone would think we're going to get more transparency this time around is beyond me. President Obama started the federal Open Data initiative and Trump, almost as quickly, neutered it just short of axing it. If they cared at all about being transparent, they would have worked on the Open Data initiatives rather than shrouding everything in further secrecy.
I think that's the whole goal. From listening to and watching these people, it seems to me that they want to end democracy and replace it with corporatocracy.
I have friends working for the CS department of one of the main Universities in Argentina. Their salaries are so bad that none of them makes a living - they all have second jobs or international grants. Two of them left to take positions in China and two more are considering it. The list of candidates for open positions is currently empty.
This is a direct result of the president's decision to defund public education at a moment where Argentina ranks 71 out of 79 countries in math (PISA 2023). And if Computer Science is doing that badly, I don't want to think about slightly less marketable careers.
Does Argentina need to reign in corruption? Yes. Was an adjustment necessary? Also yes. But what future are they building and who will benefit from it is far from clear.
There's a lot of discussion about the forest.. how about some discussion on the trees? Both are important?
I worry about cuts to departments that is on clean energy, EV, sustainability in general. (For thinking that Musk is in that industry so it wouldn't happen, there's consideration that cuts on Govt support in that area will actually benefit the one that's ahead.. that's Tesla for the charging network, the EV sales, the peaker plant replacements, etc.)
The only meaningful department they should start with is the DOD / Pentagon. I'm sure they will find room for efficiencies once an audit is complete. However, I won't hold my breathe. Bye bye dept of education.
The executive branch only spends the money approved by congress. It only runs the agencies created by Congress. The executive branch can't shrink, can't spend less money, without Congressional approval. With the vanishingly small majority Republicans will have in Congress, this sounds like a pipe dream.
There was a related Andy Kessler OpEd in the WSJ recently that shared the same tone (I can't tell if Andy is being sarcastic, but he's full of a lot of bad ideas, so I doubt it). He was advocating for wholesale removal of a lot of agencies, including the FCC, Department of Energy, and Department of Commerce, and made the claim that the FCC could be replaced by a couple of economists. I don't know if they don't understand what all the FCC does and what would happen if you removed the FCC (and just had a spectrum free-for-all), or that a lot of our research prowess comes from DoE grants, or that Department of Commerce runs things like NIST (and that it's laughable to consider disbanding what's likely the source of truth for more than just the US on absolute boatloads of metrology).
I get that there's almost certainly a lot of bloat in the government, but just outright axing stuff doesn't seem like the right way to fix things. I also don't think that we bleed the most money on those anyways, and that entitlements and what to do with them are the real elephant in the room (but of course it's not politically expedient to talk about doing anything to those, at all, ever). Fixing our debt problem (and it's a real problem, no matter what crackpot modern monetary theory believers say) will involve some pain, including likely and unfortunately raising taxes and curtailing benefits somewhere.
> As a person who has no idea what most of the agencies do
"As a person who doesn't know anything about this, here are my ideas" is, er, one approach to things, I suppose (as someone else mentioned, you've just given the FBI a fleet of over 2,000 watercraft, which doesn't seem terribly sensible).
No, no, that would be wasteful. Simply make it a policy that FBI agents travel by boat. This would of course require the building of an extremely extensive national network of canals, but I think you'll agree that it's a small price to pay, and the FEMA people who the FBI would also inherit under this plan should have plenty of expertise in hydraulic engineering.
> DHS can easily be folded into the FBI and cuts made
The reverse might make a tiny, miniscule amount of sense, but that way it is just silly. FBI is a subunit of DOJ with ~35,000 employees; DHS is an organizational peer to DOJ with ~260,000 employees; the active duty uniformed component of the Coast Guard — one unit of DHS — is around ~45,000 people.
The only good thing about the plan is it is still probably better (and less corruptly self-serving for those formulating it) than what DOGE will come up with.
Wait until the militarized ethnic cleansing already promised for day one is in full swing, there’ll be plenty of time for nakedly corrupt deals when the public has other things occupying its attention.
Elon and Vivek have no authority to close a federal agency, and Trump doesn’t either.
We’re currently in the bloviating stage of this election cycle; once attention dies down I fully expect DOGE to achieve very little and to die a slow death.
The sad part of all of this is that the government could absolutely be more efficient than it currently is, while still providing the same services. But that’d take serious thought and consensus building, which the incoming administration has no desire to engage in.
Winston Churchill supposedly said "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." I'm starting to think he was too optimistic.
Everybody who stayed home, and decided that they'd be fine with a Trump Presidency... this is your fault. I know your whole litany of excuses. Let them keep you warm, while the greater of two evils actually does the evils they said they were going to do.
Great. I am eager to see where this goes, as we have too large a civil workforce, unsustainable levels of spending, and a lack of accountability. Same for many states too.
The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
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