How are Trump and DOGE doing?

Assessments by Yuval Levin, Lee Bressler, Eliot Kaufmann, John McWhorter, Sohrab Ahmari, and Noah Smith

This is such a Current Thing that I doubt that it is my comparative advantage to cover it. I don’t plan to make a habit of it.

Here in the Maryland suburbs, the mood is despondent, as I found out at dinner with friends recently. Everybody knows someone who has been locked out of their office, or filled out the paperwork to get the 8 months severance that Trump has offered, or is worried that their job or government grant is on the chopping block, or fled the country—yes, someone from my ultra-leftwing synagogue has already moved to Ireland, citing Trump as the reason.

So there is indeed a vibe shift. Instead of the capital of the empire looking at the struggles of the nation’s heartland without much sympathy, it’s the other way around.

Here are some links.

Interviewed by Ezra Klein, Yuval Levin says,

the first few weeks of a new administration are really surreal.

They’re very different from the rest of the time, because the administration controls the agenda. And that isn’t really the case most of the time. But in the first few weeks, they’ve made plans. And you don’t know those plans, generally. They do, and they’re rolling them out at a certain pace and in a certain way. And it just feels like they are in command of the world.

…

And it doesn’t take very long for that to break. The opposition is back and organized pretty quickly — that takes a couple of weeks, maybe. And the world comes back at you, too.

President Obama had a lot of running room, in part because the press and world elites were so enthusiastic about him. But I believe that President Trump also has a lot of running room, because the opposition is divided between those on the one hand who are blind with hatred and those on the other hand, like Levin, who disapprove of Mr. Trump’s character but appreciate the backlash against the social justice activists. I see this sharp divide as keeping Mr. Trump’s opponents on their back feet until something really goes wrong under President Trump.

Levin also says,

The most stark fact about the American party system in the 21st century is that it’s failing. Both parties are failing. Neither one has been able to form a durable majority coalition in 30 years, and that has left our politics intensely divided, bitterly polarized, very dysfunctional.

…Our problem right now is not that there is this American majority out there that’s trying to get its will into action and the system is resisting it.

I disagree with his last sentence.

In most of America, the boss has authority over the employees. The Federal government does not work that way. Government workers have “civil service protection.” Agencies are “independent.” Mr. Trump is trying to exercise the powers of a boss. I think this does create a situation in which the American majority is on his side and the system is resisting it, occasionally rightly but often not.

Take USAID, for example. Lee Bressler writes,

Wasteful spending—like a $16.8 million “inclusion” program in Vietnam—is largely a matter of opinion. What one taxpayer might dismiss as frivolous, another might see as a noble investment in soft power. Fraud, on the other hand, should be a bright-line test. And when USAID pays $8 million for 437 Politico subscriptions—at over $10,000 per year per subscription—you have to ask: is this anything other than bribery? What possible justification is there for this level of spending, except to curry favor with the media and keep the political class in power?

Bressler lists many USAID grants that sound mindless. By Washington standards, they are for tiny amounts, $1 million here, $5 million there. But to the average American, $1 million is a meaningful amount of money. The fact that Washington can toss it around “like Monopoly money,” as Bressler puts it, is indicative of the cultural chasm that currently exists between the majority and the system.

Elliot Kaufman writes,

President Trump shocked the world with his proposal to resettle Gazans in nearby countries, but not because the idea is cruel. Few critics dispute his point that it would benefit the displaced to escape the “demolition site” of Gaza and live in peace rather than as cannon fodder. The real disturbance, after decades to the contrary, is to think seriously about what it would mean to put Palestinian lives first rather than sacrificing them to the lost cause of Palestine as their leaders always do.

Who cares more about the people of Gaza: you and me, or the average pro-Hamas demonstrator? Hamas and the UN agencies value Gaza as a staging area for attacks on Israel, with Gazans as human shields. It is not an edifying moral vision.

President Trump’s idea takes it as given that Gazans have been uprooted. They were uprooted because of the war that Hamas started. So should they spend the next fifteen years living on what he rightly calls a demolition site, under the same UN and Hamas auspices that brought them only death and misery, or should they find another home, either temporarily or permanently?

Mr. Trump does not shy from making radical moves. On DEI, John McWhorter writes,

DEI is based on a core assumption that battling the power of whiteness be not just one goal, but the central goal of our institutions. This is a simplistic and needlessly restrictive niche ideology, allowed freer rein than any mature society should permit. Following from that vantage-point, DEI bureaucracies have swelled beyond any plausible conception of utility…

The problem with Trump’s executive order is that it goes beyond addressing this recent transmogrification of DEI…

Outlawing affirmative action of any kind, as Trump attempts to do, will discourage institutions from trying to level the playing field at all. This overreaction to DEI’s acknowledged missteps not only sets us back—it is immorality incarnate.

My own opinion is that President Trump’s actions will benefit many more black Americans than it will harm. It will help move us toward a society where we emphasize people as individuals.

Sohrab Ahmari wants to take a pitchfork to Elon Musk.

None of this is to defend waste or entrenched bureaucrats who’ve grown accustomed to defying the president’s will, especially when the president happens to belong to the Republican Party. But de-Baathification is unlikely to work any better for the US state than it did for Iraq, and the Right, especially, should be wary of Year Zero delusions: the utopian dream of starting totally anew, unencumbered by the past — heedless of why our institutions took the shape they did.

Which brings us back to those crippled agencies, the CFBP and the NLRB. Both emerged in the wake of market emergencies: one fairly recent, the 2008-2009 financial crisis precipitated, in part, by banks’ risky home lending and the securitisation of those loans; and the other much older, the Depression, brought about by a demand crisis in the economy resulting in turn from a brutally lopsided distribution of the social income (low-paid workers unable to afford the goods they produced).

Trashing these agencies would do nothing to address the structural power imbalances which bedevil Trumpian America and which compelled it to vote for him in the first place.

I don’t sign on to either Ahmari’s rhetoric or his substance.

Noah Smith writes,

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority.

…One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

While Smith is not without sympathy for Elon, he goes on to point out a number of ways that the DOGE purge could go wrong.

substacks referenced above: @

What I think DOGE is really up to

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DEI Must Change

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The DOGE Revolution