This analysis is very good. Noah Smith seems to have gotten there first, but hearing it from someone who isn't afraid to say that what Musk (and maybe Trump) want is good, & what the career civil servants want is usually bad, is also nice.
A few months before the election I wrote an article on my Substack called "Why It Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat."
The thesis was that even when Democrats run as moderates, and even when their personal views tack close to the center, once in office they still empower the worst members of their coalition in the judiciary, civil service, regulatory boards, etc. Republicans on the other hand have done very little to push back on any of this, usually picking their own bureaucrats and judges from a pool of candidates well to the left of the average Republican voter (because people like that are easier to find) and certainly not trying to dismantle existing left-leaning power structures, even when they had clear legal authority to do so. After Trump 1.0 bumbled his way through office, I wasn't too optimistic that Trump 2.0 would do much better... but then he picked Vance for VP and Musk to run DOGE, after which I really warmed up to him.
This also compliments your piece observing that when Democrats espouse sane policies, it's only after relentless implementation of terrible policies and years after the damage is inflicted upon society.
The Schedule F moves will be the ones that matter for replacing actual decision-maker bureaucrats. Firing probational employees disproportionately reaches low level employees performing routine tasks. This is also true, albeit less so, of RIFs—the next step of federal employee purge. High level officials with years of experience are fairly insulated from these tools. So I’m not sure I fully agree with this take, at least to the extent it’s based on the “DOGE” actions thus far.
Moreover, the mass termination of probationary employees is likely unlawful, because it is clearly not based on the individual poor performance of the terminated employees. Absent some lawlessness from GOP officials during the appeals process, those employees have a good chance of reinstatement and full back pay. Just my take, though. Would be interesting to see how a betting market would do on this question.
What Trump has accomplished, in less than a month, is making public sector employment far less desirable. This has been achieved by the scale back of telework (which was already reduced significantly from its COVID-era peaks), the threat of broad RIFs (rather than rare and department-specific RIFs), and the perceived loss of security during the probationary period.
It may have made federal employment less desirable for now… but that might change when phase two of the strategy starts to replace all those DEI liberals with ideological foot soldiers of their own.
I know that must have felt very cool to type. Do you see yourself as a Tyler Durden-esque figure?
The median applicant for a position with the federal government is a college dropout applying for a job as an Assistant Claims Processor 2 or some shit. Or a never-deployed veteran applying to be a Program Manager, which is basically a secretary with medium proficiency in Microsoft office. They do it because they heard their sister in law had decent benefits, not because they want to be the deep state conspiring against Trump. Saying every American is an ideologue gives them way too much credit. These people watch The Masked Singer.
Could one make the argument that over the last 50 years, but especially in
the last decade, the Left has achieved control over most government institutions like the DOE, the EPA, the Defense Department and the list goes on and on. This has led to the Left having immense power and influence, even when a Republican was president.
Look, for example, at how the Department of Education has used its vast power over grant money to basically force schools into adopting policies the department deemed necessary, such as a focus on racism in discipline, which has had disastrous results in schools across the country.
So Trump and Musk are dismantling this power structure and this is what Democrats and the Left are terrified of because this will also dismantle the very structure of the Democrats machine which relies on a corrupt system of appointments, jobs and the exchange of vast amounts of money from government into the hands teacher’s unions, university research and nonprofits that perpetuate the system and have vast influence on the lives of everyday Americans.
I think the analogy to communist Russia better fits with the government under the Left, rather than what Trump is currently doing.
You cannot assess the outcome in 4 weeks! It been years of damage. Perhaps in a year and a half you can write about the effects. Not after 4 weeks. There is so much waste, abuse and fraud found in such a short of time. Just imagine how many trillions will be found and stopped. 77 million Americans are very happy with this moving forward. We Americans have been scammed by the government officials who was trusted to watch over our country!
It’s politically insane to hope that DOGE would position themselves as the Medicare cutters. However, if you consult people in the medical industry, they always will point you to examples of grift. If DOGE can continue its focus on “waste, fraud, and abuse”, they could throttle Medicare spend while maintaining its welfare mandate.
‘Nothing will happen to really change things’ is the most sophomoric take imaginable. This sounds more like cope than any kind of honed engagement with our moment. Meet the new boss same as the old boss? Tired cliche by this time. Yes, power and the powerful will not disappear from this earth.
Elon and DOGE’s MO is to come across something they don’t understand, and to just cut it without doing the work to understand what function it serves. (Yes, including some/lot of the laid-off federal workforce which are good talent that will not be replaced).
“This is absolutely ridiculous. And it is what happens when you judge a program in 15 seconds with zero content knowledge based on a description in a single database.”
There was a Communist takeover during the Obama era. If this were normal times I would agree with you. I don't think you understand the severity of our situation.
what you fail to grok - whether you are technically correct about "good talent" or not - is that most of this talent is working towards either outright malevolent or else useless purposes.
The best case scenario for Elon is to be "co-president" from now until 2036, effectively granting him three consecutive terms. I don't mean to compare Elon to Hitler in a derisive way, but purely looking at the time scale, 12 years is a very long time in which many things can be changed. Or if you don't like the Hitler analogy, FDR changed the country tremendously in 12 years. Consider how different the country is today compared to 2013.
If I were Elon, I would see the next four years as one long election campaign to get JD Vance into office. Once that has been accomplished, the chance of an incumbent re-election in 2032 is quite high.
One of the advantageous things about DOGE is that it sidesteps two losing issues for Republicans: abortions and guns. By focusing attention on spending, budgeting, and personnel, Elon is avoiding alienating independents and moderates.
The best hope for Democrats in 2028 is simply a recession. Recessions happen, no matter how good your economic policy is, and Trump's tariff's aren't going to boost the economy in the short term.
Can you link *me* some analysis showing that gun control has cost GOP elections? Or even net votes?
(To be very clear, the other issue you cite, abortion, I 100% concur that in the aftermath of Roe being overturned has indeed cost them some elections.)
ChatGPT, FWIW, seems to agree with my thesis (not that that alone should be considered dispositive).
Rather than give you analysis, let me give you the 3 part logical argument:
1. The only people for whom policy on such laws matters are hard core voters for either side. There is not intensity on this issue for folks in the middle.
2. Dem’s position of being soft on crime and soft on sentencing - most definitely including being unwilling to prosecute criminals for their gun crimes, but instead use such laws primarily against otherwise honest citizens - hurts Dem election chances far more than any supposed net negative that GOP gun control position hurts their side.
3. If gun control were such a winning issue for the Dems, Kamala would not have boasted last summer on Oprah’s platform about owning a firearm and said “If somebody breaks in my house they're getting shot."
You might find my first two points unconvincing, idk. But how do you possibly explain away the 3rd?
I think you're overcomplicating an issue. If the majority of Americans support stricter gun control, it's reasonable to assume that this has a suppressant effect on voters. We can argue about the magnitude of the effect (it may be <1%, and therefore doesn't change the outcome of elections), but the direction is not in dispute.
Proving causality here beyond this is not reasonable. For example, I couldn't *prove* that abortion costs Republicans elections, unless I asked voters specifically, "if this Republican supported abortion, would you have changed your vote?" I'm sure that data exists somewhere, and I'd love to see it, but I've provided you data and you've not reciprocated.
edit: regarding Kamala, voters trust her more on guns than they trust Trump. It's moderating the position without changing the position.
If all voters, rather than only leftist voters, trusted Kamala more on guns, why did she make the “bold” (for her, especially compared to the rest of her campaign) statement that “If somebody breaks in my house they're getting shot”?
Why was it needed? If Kamala’s position on guns was far superior to Trump’s position, there would have been no need to “moderate” it, would there?
So if you want to claim that because some polls show that the narrow question of “gun control” is a popular issue and that therefore the GOP position on “gun control” is unpopular, then you must acknowledge that the Dem position on guns in general and “gun ownership” is unpopular, and that Kamala’s team believed it was costing her votes, and so had her say what she said on Oprah to help her win more votes.
Else you are claiming that Kamala’s election campaign was stupid and made a strategic mistake with her “getting shot” statement.
In a lot of ways, Musk's Space X is the continuation of Wernher Von Braun's program after Operation Paperclip. Time will tell just how much Musk and Von Braun have in common.
"We can make an analogy here to the way that communist regimes have exerted control over society through the appointments of commissars to governmental and non-governmental institutions, including factories and different branches of the military. During the Russian Civil War, for example, the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union."
Yes, he's saying it's a good thing. Donald Trump was elected to his office fair and square; he has a right to control executive branch employees. The fact that people like Lenin also knew how to wield power doesn't mean that wielding power is bad... or that power isn't power when it's wielded by a scholarly oligarchy (i.e. what Trump/Musk are trying to dismantly) rather than the actual head if state.
Read Yarvin sometime. Or read my own article about how it doesn't matter when Democrats run as moderates because they always turn over power to the worst members of their coalitions in the judiciary and the civil service: https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz
"The fact that people like Lenin also knew how to wield power doesn't mean that wielding power is bad" It is when you wield power LIKE Lenin and for similar purposes. And if that seems like an overreaction, I wasn't the one who brought up the comparison.
"It is when you wield power LIKE Lenin and for similar purposes..."
Has your brain fallen out? How many summary executions have Trump and Musk ordered? How many people are freezing their ass off in a prison camp in the middle of Alaska for criticizing DOGE? Has Congress been disbanded like the Constituent Assembly? There is no fair comparison there at all.
"And if that seems like an overreaction, I wasn't the one who brought up the comparison." Reading comprehension does not seem to be a thing with you, Mr. "Patriot." Nor does common respect. I would rather not wait until President Musk starts summary executions, thank you very much.
How many people were freezing their ass off in the North Carolina winter before Trump was elected and actually started helping those poor people? Comparing useless gov't employees to American citizens who have been abandoned by their government is nonsense.
Yarvin and people like Vought are crazy authoritarians. If American people still have any instinct for freedom they will kick out these fascists in four years. You criticize democrats but don’t you see how Trump is giving power to the worst people?
Curtis Yarvin is actually pretty explicit in his writings that he thinks "fascism" is bad. And he's also way more in favor of free speech and economic freedom and freedom of association than the mainstream of either American party. You have to do some serious mental gymnastics to portray him as a fascist.
I don't agree with everything that Yarvin believes, but I do agree with his most basic thesis - i.e. that the post-New Deal regime is based on fooling voters into thinking they have more power than they actually do, and that the "permanent government" ( i.e. the combination of law courts plus regulatory agencies that finds ways to overrule and/or evade anything the elected arm of the government does that it disapproves of) is just as authoritarian as any other authoritarian regime.
If you're terrified of the president having too much power, but nonchalant about the pre-Trump bureaucracy and Supreme Court having way more power than Trump ever did (and having all that power WITHOUT the limitation of possibly being voted out in four years) - and indeed if you insist that the pre-Trump situation (with things like Roe v. Wade still in place) was somehow more "democratic" than what we have now... then you are the sort of person who, if the 20th century had taken a different turn, would have had a very easy time learning to love Big Brother.
This piece ignores a key fact about Trump: he will not be overshadowed by anyone and inevitably stabs in the back every single person who works for him. I’ll be shocked if Musk isn’t fired within this admin, probably long before the midterms. The only scenario where he is staying for the long run is if trump is seriously going senile to the point of changing his m.o. of decades. But provided that trump is the same trump he’ll throw musk under the bus the second he thinks it convenient as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow
Has he ever made an alliance with anybody as powerful as musk? Musk is known for being very vengeful and has a platform to enact significant revenge. He's also the richest man in world.
It's a fair question. But Trump is also not known for being a super rational actor. It *may* end up differently this time round for the reasons you state, but I think that at the very least we can't take it for granted!
I am hopeful there is a fall out but naked self interest might keep the alliance going for longer than we would otherwise expect. If it all falls apart I would be delighted.
A very dumb comment, which might be tolerated if it wasn’t insulting. And even the insult might be tolerable if you weren’t hiding behind anonymity, coward. 30 day ban.
I don't think even in business 101 they teach "remove all waste" because in the real world there also exist the concerns of opportunity cost, diminishing returns, etc.
Trump and Musk talk about how bureaucrats were stifling his executive orders. The "efficiency" in department of governmental efficiency appears to be in considerable part about making the executive branch as a whole more.
"Much has been made of the firings, but even if you let go of 1 in 4 government workers, you’d only reduce federal spending by 1%. You’d need to cut spending by about a quarter to balance the budget, so firing that many people would get you about 4% of the way there"
Even when I disagree with Richard's takes, it's usually not because he is being disingenuous like he is here with the claim that even firing a quarter of the workforce would only "get you about 4% of the way there."
Richard's "THERE" would be taking the *budget* to zero, not just the DEFICIT to zero!!
And of course NO ONE claimed they were going to actually balance the budget, so even zero deficit was not the target. The highest end target by Musk was $2 trillion in reductions, later cut back to $1T.
BUT THERE WAS NO TIMEFRAME SPECIFIED IN THOSE REDUCTIONS!
Most such savings / deficit additions/reductions in Washington DC these days are talked about in 10 year timeframes.
Numbers: The totality of Federal annual spending today is about $7.3 Trillion. Interest is $1.1T of it, leaving $6.2T, of which SS, Medicare and Medicaid make up about $3T, other entitlements another $700B, and other mandatory spending another $800B.
Leaving only about $1.6T-$1.7T total discretionary spending across defense and non-defense!!
Elon ain't a politician, but the idea that he was ever claiming to save $2T or even $1T PER YEAR from DOGE alone is just whack.*
Per year, that would be impossible without Congress passing a new budget, and frankly even if the GOP had comfortable majorities in the house and 63 votes in the Senate, they STILL wouldn't reduce spending by $2T a year, and not particularly likely to reduce it by $1T a year. But even if you think I am too pessimistic about what Congress could do, Richard knows as I do that only a budget passed by Congress could do that.
The point of the above is that claims of only getting you "about 4% of the way there" if you actually fired a quarter of the workforce are disingenuous. Given ~$1.2T in annual federal employee wages/salaries/benefits costs, that close to $300B a year savings would be $3T over ten years. And it would be about 15% of even a $2T *annual* savings goal, and 30% of a $1T annual goal.
So no matter how you slice it, it would get you a LOT further than 4% towards any *actual* suggested goal.
All that said, I don't disagree with Richard's bigger thesis here that DOGE is not simply primarily about the cost-savings. But disingenuous use of statistics serves no one, and OCD-like-me Richard rarely does this.
Either that, or he made a simple 4x math mistake, and he should have used 4% and 16% where he wrote 1% and 4%... :-)
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* Literally the only way to get to numbers approaching $1T *per year* would be to somehow find most of it in SS/Medicare/Medicaid/entitlement fraud. Because otherwise the numbers just don't add up.
What nonsense. When people talk about the budget the default is yearly. That’s the way it has always been unless a time frame is specified. That’s how everyone has taken Musk’s comments.
Musk tweets a million times a day, if he was talking about a ten year time frame he could’ve corrected people, he hasn’t. I’ve seen no Musk fans make that argument. You pulled it out of your ass, or got it from some right wing source that probably just gets info from other right wing sources and isn’t even familiar with how people talk about the budget.
Trump/Musk lies are so extreme that their defenders are always coming up with new bullshit to justify them.
UPDATE: Also, Elon just approvingly retweeted a tweet saying it was yearly, so there goes that.
Now how about the fact that *your* math was off by a factor of 4 or 8?
25% (1 out of 4) of $1.2T annual federal employee costs - $300B/year - in fact is 15% of $2T, and 30% of the $1T that Musk just tweeted. Way bigger than the “4% of the way there” if “you let go 1 out of 4 government workers” that *you* claimed.
Or did you just pull your numbers out of your ass?
Is your ~7.5x (3.75x if I’m being charitable) bullshit less extreme?
It’s ok to attack and ridicule others’ errors or outrageous claims, but not own up to your own?
UPDATE: My $1.2T federal annual employee cost estimates I got from ChatGPT and Claude might be high in terms of how they account for contractor employees. I might have been as much as 50% too high (perhaps should be $800B instead of $1.2T). But even if so, your numbers are off by a factor of 5x, or 2.5x at the most charitable - still making your 4% claim a huge undercount.
"The government is on track to spend $7trn this year. Nearly two-thirds of this consists of mandatory expenditures on Social Security and health insurance." How much of that is the 50,000,000 fraudulent SS numbers they've found so far? How much more waste, corruption, and fraud will be found in the rest of the $7trn? Is cannot be impossible to get back to government spending before Biden took office: $4.5trn minus Covid.
It “cannot be impossible to get back to government spending before Biden took office: $4.5trn minus Covid”
Well, given the 21%+ inflation since then, and given that the interest on the national debt has gone up so much since then, partly due to the added debt and mostly due to significantly higher interest rates (mostly but not entirely thanks to Biden’s inflation), going back to that $4.5T would indeed be close to impossible.
But getting back to ~$6T should surely be doable. DOGE can find some fraction of the delta, perhaps/hopefully. Congress would have to do the rest.
This analysis is very good. Noah Smith seems to have gotten there first, but hearing it from someone who isn't afraid to say that what Musk (and maybe Trump) want is good, & what the career civil servants want is usually bad, is also nice.
A few months before the election I wrote an article on my Substack called "Why It Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat."
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz
The thesis was that even when Democrats run as moderates, and even when their personal views tack close to the center, once in office they still empower the worst members of their coalition in the judiciary, civil service, regulatory boards, etc. Republicans on the other hand have done very little to push back on any of this, usually picking their own bureaucrats and judges from a pool of candidates well to the left of the average Republican voter (because people like that are easier to find) and certainly not trying to dismantle existing left-leaning power structures, even when they had clear legal authority to do so. After Trump 1.0 bumbled his way through office, I wasn't too optimistic that Trump 2.0 would do much better... but then he picked Vance for VP and Musk to run DOGE, after which I really warmed up to him.
This also compliments your piece observing that when Democrats espouse sane policies, it's only after relentless implementation of terrible policies and years after the damage is inflicted upon society.
The Schedule F moves will be the ones that matter for replacing actual decision-maker bureaucrats. Firing probational employees disproportionately reaches low level employees performing routine tasks. This is also true, albeit less so, of RIFs—the next step of federal employee purge. High level officials with years of experience are fairly insulated from these tools. So I’m not sure I fully agree with this take, at least to the extent it’s based on the “DOGE” actions thus far.
Moreover, the mass termination of probationary employees is likely unlawful, because it is clearly not based on the individual poor performance of the terminated employees. Absent some lawlessness from GOP officials during the appeals process, those employees have a good chance of reinstatement and full back pay. Just my take, though. Would be interesting to see how a betting market would do on this question.
What Trump has accomplished, in less than a month, is making public sector employment far less desirable. This has been achieved by the scale back of telework (which was already reduced significantly from its COVID-era peaks), the threat of broad RIFs (rather than rare and department-specific RIFs), and the perceived loss of security during the probationary period.
It may have made federal employment less desirable for now… but that might change when phase two of the strategy starts to replace all those DEI liberals with ideological foot soldiers of their own.
I meant appeal as a vocation to the general public, not ideologues (of either side).
Everyone, including you is an ideologue. You can bullshit me but i but don't bullshit yourself.
I know that must have felt very cool to type. Do you see yourself as a Tyler Durden-esque figure?
The median applicant for a position with the federal government is a college dropout applying for a job as an Assistant Claims Processor 2 or some shit. Or a never-deployed veteran applying to be a Program Manager, which is basically a secretary with medium proficiency in Microsoft office. They do it because they heard their sister in law had decent benefits, not because they want to be the deep state conspiring against Trump. Saying every American is an ideologue gives them way too much credit. These people watch The Masked Singer.
Could one make the argument that over the last 50 years, but especially in
the last decade, the Left has achieved control over most government institutions like the DOE, the EPA, the Defense Department and the list goes on and on. This has led to the Left having immense power and influence, even when a Republican was president.
Look, for example, at how the Department of Education has used its vast power over grant money to basically force schools into adopting policies the department deemed necessary, such as a focus on racism in discipline, which has had disastrous results in schools across the country.
So Trump and Musk are dismantling this power structure and this is what Democrats and the Left are terrified of because this will also dismantle the very structure of the Democrats machine which relies on a corrupt system of appointments, jobs and the exchange of vast amounts of money from government into the hands teacher’s unions, university research and nonprofits that perpetuate the system and have vast influence on the lives of everyday Americans.
I think the analogy to communist Russia better fits with the government under the Left, rather than what Trump is currently doing.
You cannot assess the outcome in 4 weeks! It been years of damage. Perhaps in a year and a half you can write about the effects. Not after 4 weeks. There is so much waste, abuse and fraud found in such a short of time. Just imagine how many trillions will be found and stopped. 77 million Americans are very happy with this moving forward. We Americans have been scammed by the government officials who was trusted to watch over our country!
Well, "trillions" will *not* be found and stopped. But otherwise I agree strongly with the rest of your points.
It’s politically insane to hope that DOGE would position themselves as the Medicare cutters. However, if you consult people in the medical industry, they always will point you to examples of grift. If DOGE can continue its focus on “waste, fraud, and abuse”, they could throttle Medicare spend while maintaining its welfare mandate.
‘Nothing will happen to really change things’ is the most sophomoric take imaginable. This sounds more like cope than any kind of honed engagement with our moment. Meet the new boss same as the old boss? Tired cliche by this time. Yes, power and the powerful will not disappear from this earth.
Yep, learned helplessness in blog form.
Elon and DOGE’s MO is to come across something they don’t understand, and to just cut it without doing the work to understand what function it serves. (Yes, including some/lot of the laid-off federal workforce which are good talent that will not be replaced).
For example, this Adam Ozimek tweet perfectly sums up what DOGE is doing: https://x.com/ModeledBehavior/status/1890430330982539453%E2%80%9D
“This is absolutely ridiculous. And it is what happens when you judge a program in 15 seconds with zero content knowledge based on a description in a single database.”
There was a Communist takeover during the Obama era. If this were normal times I would agree with you. I don't think you understand the severity of our situation.
what you fail to grok - whether you are technically correct about "good talent" or not - is that most of this talent is working towards either outright malevolent or else useless purposes.
It's not. You're just a partisan who has had his mind broken.
Exactly.
I am just a partisan with a broken mind.
The only possible explanation for not siding with leftists on this. Very compelling argument.
You and Adam Ozimek are non-partisans with no biases or axes to grind, with perfect information and perfect, perfectly fair minds.
The best case scenario for Elon is to be "co-president" from now until 2036, effectively granting him three consecutive terms. I don't mean to compare Elon to Hitler in a derisive way, but purely looking at the time scale, 12 years is a very long time in which many things can be changed. Or if you don't like the Hitler analogy, FDR changed the country tremendously in 12 years. Consider how different the country is today compared to 2013.
If I were Elon, I would see the next four years as one long election campaign to get JD Vance into office. Once that has been accomplished, the chance of an incumbent re-election in 2032 is quite high.
One of the advantageous things about DOGE is that it sidesteps two losing issues for Republicans: abortions and guns. By focusing attention on spending, budgeting, and personnel, Elon is avoiding alienating independents and moderates.
The best hope for Democrats in 2028 is simply a recession. Recessions happen, no matter how good your economic policy is, and Trump's tariff's aren't going to boost the economy in the short term.
Interesting take.
You are wrong and have no evidence whatsoever that guns are a net losing issue for Republicans, however. Most analyses show it as a positive.
Can you link me some analysis? I’ve seen that majority of Americans support stricter gun control: https://news.gallup.com/poll/513623/majority-continues-favor-stricter-gun-laws.aspx
Can you link *me* some analysis showing that gun control has cost GOP elections? Or even net votes?
(To be very clear, the other issue you cite, abortion, I 100% concur that in the aftermath of Roe being overturned has indeed cost them some elections.)
ChatGPT, FWIW, seems to agree with my thesis (not that that alone should be considered dispositive).
Rather than give you analysis, let me give you the 3 part logical argument:
1. The only people for whom policy on such laws matters are hard core voters for either side. There is not intensity on this issue for folks in the middle.
2. Dem’s position of being soft on crime and soft on sentencing - most definitely including being unwilling to prosecute criminals for their gun crimes, but instead use such laws primarily against otherwise honest citizens - hurts Dem election chances far more than any supposed net negative that GOP gun control position hurts their side.
3. If gun control were such a winning issue for the Dems, Kamala would not have boasted last summer on Oprah’s platform about owning a firearm and said “If somebody breaks in my house they're getting shot."
You might find my first two points unconvincing, idk. But how do you possibly explain away the 3rd?
I think you're overcomplicating an issue. If the majority of Americans support stricter gun control, it's reasonable to assume that this has a suppressant effect on voters. We can argue about the magnitude of the effect (it may be <1%, and therefore doesn't change the outcome of elections), but the direction is not in dispute.
Proving causality here beyond this is not reasonable. For example, I couldn't *prove* that abortion costs Republicans elections, unless I asked voters specifically, "if this Republican supported abortion, would you have changed your vote?" I'm sure that data exists somewhere, and I'd love to see it, but I've provided you data and you've not reciprocated.
edit: regarding Kamala, voters trust her more on guns than they trust Trump. It's moderating the position without changing the position.
If all voters, rather than only leftist voters, trusted Kamala more on guns, why did she make the “bold” (for her, especially compared to the rest of her campaign) statement that “If somebody breaks in my house they're getting shot”?
Why was it needed? If Kamala’s position on guns was far superior to Trump’s position, there would have been no need to “moderate” it, would there?
So if you want to claim that because some polls show that the narrow question of “gun control” is a popular issue and that therefore the GOP position on “gun control” is unpopular, then you must acknowledge that the Dem position on guns in general and “gun ownership” is unpopular, and that Kamala’s team believed it was costing her votes, and so had her say what she said on Oprah to help her win more votes.
Else you are claiming that Kamala’s election campaign was stupid and made a strategic mistake with her “getting shot” statement.
The rest later.
What kind of sophistry is it to claim that moderating a political position is not changing the position?
It’s indeed true that moderating is not *flipping* the position.
But why the need to even moderate the position if the GOP position is the losing one?
In a lot of ways, Musk's Space X is the continuation of Wernher Von Braun's program after Operation Paperclip. Time will tell just how much Musk and Von Braun have in common.
"We can make an analogy here to the way that communist regimes have exerted control over society through the appointments of commissars to governmental and non-governmental institutions, including factories and different branches of the military. During the Russian Civil War, for example, the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union."
And you're saying this is a good thing.
Yes, he's saying it's a good thing. Donald Trump was elected to his office fair and square; he has a right to control executive branch employees. The fact that people like Lenin also knew how to wield power doesn't mean that wielding power is bad... or that power isn't power when it's wielded by a scholarly oligarchy (i.e. what Trump/Musk are trying to dismantly) rather than the actual head if state.
Read Yarvin sometime. Or read my own article about how it doesn't matter when Democrats run as moderates because they always turn over power to the worst members of their coalitions in the judiciary and the civil service: https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz
"The fact that people like Lenin also knew how to wield power doesn't mean that wielding power is bad" It is when you wield power LIKE Lenin and for similar purposes. And if that seems like an overreaction, I wasn't the one who brought up the comparison.
"It is when you wield power LIKE Lenin and for similar purposes..."
Has your brain fallen out? How many summary executions have Trump and Musk ordered? How many people are freezing their ass off in a prison camp in the middle of Alaska for criticizing DOGE? Has Congress been disbanded like the Constituent Assembly? There is no fair comparison there at all.
"And if that seems like an overreaction, I wasn't the one who brought up the comparison." Reading comprehension does not seem to be a thing with you, Mr. "Patriot." Nor does common respect. I would rather not wait until President Musk starts summary executions, thank you very much.
…and Trump colluded with Russia to fraudulently win the 2016 election. Mueller just didn’t look hard enough or long enough…
🙄
How many people were freezing their ass off in the North Carolina winter before Trump was elected and actually started helping those poor people? Comparing useless gov't employees to American citizens who have been abandoned by their government is nonsense.
“… and for similar purposes”
Yes, the purposes are clearly similar.
🙄🙄🙄
TDS is strong with this one…
Yarvin isn't a serious thinker man. Come on!
Yarvin and people like Vought are crazy authoritarians. If American people still have any instinct for freedom they will kick out these fascists in four years. You criticize democrats but don’t you see how Trump is giving power to the worst people?
Curtis Yarvin is actually pretty explicit in his writings that he thinks "fascism" is bad. And he's also way more in favor of free speech and economic freedom and freedom of association than the mainstream of either American party. You have to do some serious mental gymnastics to portray him as a fascist.
I don't agree with everything that Yarvin believes, but I do agree with his most basic thesis - i.e. that the post-New Deal regime is based on fooling voters into thinking they have more power than they actually do, and that the "permanent government" ( i.e. the combination of law courts plus regulatory agencies that finds ways to overrule and/or evade anything the elected arm of the government does that it disapproves of) is just as authoritarian as any other authoritarian regime.
If you're terrified of the president having too much power, but nonchalant about the pre-Trump bureaucracy and Supreme Court having way more power than Trump ever did (and having all that power WITHOUT the limitation of possibly being voted out in four years) - and indeed if you insist that the pre-Trump situation (with things like Roe v. Wade still in place) was somehow more "democratic" than what we have now... then you are the sort of person who, if the 20th century had taken a different turn, would have had a very easy time learning to love Big Brother.
That is all wrong. You are a troll.
Exactly. The idea that he is anything but a run of the mill authoritarian is laughable.
This piece ignores a key fact about Trump: he will not be overshadowed by anyone and inevitably stabs in the back every single person who works for him. I’ll be shocked if Musk isn’t fired within this admin, probably long before the midterms. The only scenario where he is staying for the long run is if trump is seriously going senile to the point of changing his m.o. of decades. But provided that trump is the same trump he’ll throw musk under the bus the second he thinks it convenient as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow
Has he ever made an alliance with anybody as powerful as musk? Musk is known for being very vengeful and has a platform to enact significant revenge. He's also the richest man in world.
Past actions of trump may not apply here
It's a fair question. But Trump is also not known for being a super rational actor. It *may* end up differently this time round for the reasons you state, but I think that at the very least we can't take it for granted!
I am hopeful there is a fall out but naked self interest might keep the alliance going for longer than we would otherwise expect. If it all falls apart I would be delighted.
A very dumb comment, which might be tolerated if it wasn’t insulting. And even the insult might be tolerable if you weren’t hiding behind anonymity, coward. 30 day ban.
I don't think even in business 101 they teach "remove all waste" because in the real world there also exist the concerns of opportunity cost, diminishing returns, etc.
Your observation here actually lines up with what Musk and Trump say in this interview. Skip to the 7:50 mark.
https://youtu.be/hMbcMO5JgEo?si=DBUBjAly9wuaVshm&t=470
Trump and Musk talk about how bureaucrats were stifling his executive orders. The "efficiency" in department of governmental efficiency appears to be in considerable part about making the executive branch as a whole more.
"Much has been made of the firings, but even if you let go of 1 in 4 government workers, you’d only reduce federal spending by 1%. You’d need to cut spending by about a quarter to balance the budget, so firing that many people would get you about 4% of the way there"
Even when I disagree with Richard's takes, it's usually not because he is being disingenuous like he is here with the claim that even firing a quarter of the workforce would only "get you about 4% of the way there."
Richard's "THERE" would be taking the *budget* to zero, not just the DEFICIT to zero!!
And of course NO ONE claimed they were going to actually balance the budget, so even zero deficit was not the target. The highest end target by Musk was $2 trillion in reductions, later cut back to $1T.
BUT THERE WAS NO TIMEFRAME SPECIFIED IN THOSE REDUCTIONS!
Most such savings / deficit additions/reductions in Washington DC these days are talked about in 10 year timeframes.
Numbers: The totality of Federal annual spending today is about $7.3 Trillion. Interest is $1.1T of it, leaving $6.2T, of which SS, Medicare and Medicaid make up about $3T, other entitlements another $700B, and other mandatory spending another $800B.
Leaving only about $1.6T-$1.7T total discretionary spending across defense and non-defense!!
Elon ain't a politician, but the idea that he was ever claiming to save $2T or even $1T PER YEAR from DOGE alone is just whack.*
Per year, that would be impossible without Congress passing a new budget, and frankly even if the GOP had comfortable majorities in the house and 63 votes in the Senate, they STILL wouldn't reduce spending by $2T a year, and not particularly likely to reduce it by $1T a year. But even if you think I am too pessimistic about what Congress could do, Richard knows as I do that only a budget passed by Congress could do that.
The point of the above is that claims of only getting you "about 4% of the way there" if you actually fired a quarter of the workforce are disingenuous. Given ~$1.2T in annual federal employee wages/salaries/benefits costs, that close to $300B a year savings would be $3T over ten years. And it would be about 15% of even a $2T *annual* savings goal, and 30% of a $1T annual goal.
So no matter how you slice it, it would get you a LOT further than 4% towards any *actual* suggested goal.
All that said, I don't disagree with Richard's bigger thesis here that DOGE is not simply primarily about the cost-savings. But disingenuous use of statistics serves no one, and OCD-like-me Richard rarely does this.
Either that, or he made a simple 4x math mistake, and he should have used 4% and 16% where he wrote 1% and 4%... :-)
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* Literally the only way to get to numbers approaching $1T *per year* would be to somehow find most of it in SS/Medicare/Medicaid/entitlement fraud. Because otherwise the numbers just don't add up.
What nonsense. When people talk about the budget the default is yearly. That’s the way it has always been unless a time frame is specified. That’s how everyone has taken Musk’s comments.
Musk tweets a million times a day, if he was talking about a ten year time frame he could’ve corrected people, he hasn’t. I’ve seen no Musk fans make that argument. You pulled it out of your ass, or got it from some right wing source that probably just gets info from other right wing sources and isn’t even familiar with how people talk about the budget.
Trump/Musk lies are so extreme that their defenders are always coming up with new bullshit to justify them.
UPDATE: Also, Elon just approvingly retweeted a tweet saying it was yearly, so there goes that.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1892050348723834934
Ok, fair enough on the annual claim.
Now how about the fact that *your* math was off by a factor of 4 or 8?
25% (1 out of 4) of $1.2T annual federal employee costs - $300B/year - in fact is 15% of $2T, and 30% of the $1T that Musk just tweeted. Way bigger than the “4% of the way there” if “you let go 1 out of 4 government workers” that *you* claimed.
Or did you just pull your numbers out of your ass?
Is your ~7.5x (3.75x if I’m being charitable) bullshit less extreme?
It’s ok to attack and ridicule others’ errors or outrageous claims, but not own up to your own?
UPDATE: My $1.2T federal annual employee cost estimates I got from ChatGPT and Claude might be high in terms of how they account for contractor employees. I might have been as much as 50% too high (perhaps should be $800B instead of $1.2T). But even if so, your numbers are off by a factor of 5x, or 2.5x at the most charitable - still making your 4% claim a huge undercount.
"The government is on track to spend $7trn this year. Nearly two-thirds of this consists of mandatory expenditures on Social Security and health insurance." How much of that is the 50,000,000 fraudulent SS numbers they've found so far? How much more waste, corruption, and fraud will be found in the rest of the $7trn? Is cannot be impossible to get back to government spending before Biden took office: $4.5trn minus Covid.
It “cannot be impossible to get back to government spending before Biden took office: $4.5trn minus Covid”
Well, given the 21%+ inflation since then, and given that the interest on the national debt has gone up so much since then, partly due to the added debt and mostly due to significantly higher interest rates (mostly but not entirely thanks to Biden’s inflation), going back to that $4.5T would indeed be close to impossible.
But getting back to ~$6T should surely be doable. DOGE can find some fraction of the delta, perhaps/hopefully. Congress would have to do the rest.
That’s why we need inspiration. Check out a new way of governance. https://marniekhaw.substack.com/p/community-based-governance
Everything is going in the right direction!!!