Don’t we all realize that DOGE will not, acting independently, result in serious budget reductions and elimination of federal programs and agencies that were created by Congress? However, DOGE is demonstrating a few key facts — substantial corruption may be the norm, there is no real oversight of these programs by either Congress or the Executive Branch, no accountability, no meaningful metrics to judge program effectiveness, and, sometimes, funding two or more programs that work at cross purposes. In short, DOGE is more of an attempt to educate the public about the realities of how the federal government actually works and create momentum for deep budget cuts when a crisis forces action.
I don’t know if it is intentionally educational but it is effective.
Relatedly, I think the “numbers are small overall ” folks should consider that chimps and men share 99% DNA similarity. That’s statistically significant!
1. The fraud corruption may be a small part of overall govt spending that includes social security, but it may be a substantial chunk of discretionary and Medicare spending. That is, it’s a big chunk of everything thing government actively works on rather than just passively cuts checks for.
2. It really doesn’t matter the size if it’s is effectively politicians funneling money to themselves through NGOs set up like proverbial shell companies. It’s basically welfare for rich snobs. Abolish it.
3. Abolish was theater of its time and wholly ineffective.
A budget is a limit… the amount it is thought needs to be spent to achieve certain objectives. It is not the amount that HAS to be spent.
In bureaucracies this year’s budget will be based on last year’s spending plus an allowance for inflation. If last year’s spending was, say, 15% less than budgeted, this years’s budget will be reduced - the horror! A nightmare scenario for bureaucrats.
Reward in bureaucracies is grade based. Each grade level and reward (remuneration, plus benefits, plus privileges) is determined by size of establishment: how many reportees, how big the budget. In order to go up a grade, the establishment/budget responsibility has to increase. This is a disincentive for increased labour productivity and reduction of operational expenses.
Labour productivity: the amount of labour input to produce a unit of output. Increased productivity means reducing labour input per unit of output. Successfully companies have this as a main aim, because it reduces costs therefore increases profits, and/or allows lower pricing to gain increased turnover which boosts profits. Successful bureaucracies as their main aim, reduced labour productivity and reduced efficiency.
In Government, politicians - and the grand public - do not understand the concept of labour productivity or overall efficiency - maximum out for minimum input.
Therefore in order to get more out, MORE! money MUST! be spent and more people employed delivering whatever they are supposed to deliver. Therefore, plans to cut funding, reduce personnel is political suicide because this must mean LESS of whatever the grand public thinks it’s getting from the State from its taxes.
Bureaucrats know this which is why their primary aim is to expand establishment by introducing procedures which slow down throughput and cause backlogs, hire more staff to trip over each other, and find new areas that need more bureaucracy… like climate change, gender nonsense.
It is quite extraordinary how little this is understood.
Allocated is not the same as budgeted. For example, a budget may allow for expenditure on new equipment of, say $200 000, in the budgetary period, but only $150 000 might be actually allocated for equipment on order part way through the budget, $50 000 kept back in case more is needed later on. The UK has a National Health Service (NHS) which is a bureaucracy funded by annual fixed budgets out of taxation. For historic reasons, the UK financial year ends on 04 April and so the NHS budget period ends on that date. Any budgeted money unspent is no longer available and cannot be carried forward. The amount actually used from this year’s budget is the bases for calculating next.
It is usual for suppliers to receive a flurry of orders in February and March from hospitals to order things - equipment and particularly consumables - for delivery after 04 April. These prospective purchases are then entered in the accounts and funds “allocated” from the current budget, but won’t come out if the next year’s budget. It’s the trick bureaucrats use to maintain budgeting levels to provide the base for next budget round as I outlined above. It is probably why there was a Supreme Court case as somebody was trying to stop what amounts to defrauding the public purse.
Yes, indeed, everybody seems pretty happy with the status quo and not in the least worried about the US’s financial situation.
Trump has pared back the DOGE chain saw to a hatchet and now to a scalpel. And now he is encouraging funding for the rest of the year that cuts nothing. No rescission bill introduced.
was just signed into law as of January 5 of this year thereby increasing the 75 year actuarial deficit by 0.04 percent. Couch change. (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60876 ). And Congress is even now debating whether to repeal the existing ban on Medicare coverage of weight loss drugs used solely for weight loss purposes, a move CBO suggests might cost around $35 billion. Couch change. (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60816 ).
And everybody is attacking Musk from both left and right, courts and congress, for even attempting to reduce a little spending here and there.
Unfortunately DOGE got hung up on attacking “waste.”
If there was anybody the least bit interested in the country’s financial future, we wouldn’t be worrying about waste, we would be repealing and rescinding funding for everything that is not an essential, high priority mission that is properly in the competence of the federal government. That includes every one of the thousands of half-decent brain fart programs and agencies that a congressman managed to get enacted over the last 100 years. Just scrolling through the table of contents of each volume of the United States Code one comes across hundreds of silly little well meaning programs that don’t cost a lot and fly under the radar but in the aggregate suffocate the nation.
Here is a list of 441 federal agencies: https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies And congress claims to exercise oversight authority. Buffoons. Propose to repeal even the cheapest and lowliest one and everyone on both left and right will defend it to the death with all sorts of flim-flammery about how “doing this will not solve the budget problem” or “this proposal is not part of an orderly process and would better accomplished following the highly efficacious model of the Grace Commission.” Or offering one of ten thousand other blue sky alternatives that has failed every previous time attempted and has no chance of being enacted whatsoever.
Milton Friedman wanted to abolish departments. Great. How many did he get abolished? No, Milton Friedman’s great legacy, the all volunteer standing military, is now costing us over $500 bilion annually in military retirement benefits.
Nope. Please someone, show me a politician who is behaving seriously about reform. I can’t name a one.
The reason is perhaps foundational in that the US Constitution as extensively described in the Federalist Papers is designed so that the central government has unlimited powers of taxation and debt and a standing army to keep a boot on the throat of any in the population so unwise as to protest the plunder (domestic enemies).
When the whole sorry mess finally collapses, those who seek to rebuild might want to consider building up from the municipality and county level and not giving the central government any tax, spending, or judicial authority at all.
It will all only be performative until the people of the country start over again from scratch.
There's something in here that I want to point to as unhealthy about the way we generally think about government spending.
> And Congress is even now debating whether to repeal the existing ban on Medicare coverage of weight loss drugs used solely for weight loss purposes, a move CBO suggests might cost around $35 billion.
-
But we know that obesity drastically reduces health and (shockingly) increases health care costs.
So this would be seem to me to be a welfare-enhancing policy with a good chance of saving money.
I get, and generally agree with the desire to cut government. But largely this debate shows that there's a goldilocks zone.
1. There's a lot of pretty obvious targets for cuts. And people will pillory cutters (e.g. DOGE) for even trying to do anything. You're not trying hard enough, you're gonna fail, blah blah blah.
2. There are lots of people who in their desire for cuts, will target things that shouldn't necessarily be cut.
“… for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.“
Going out on a limb here… d’you think the former may be the result of the latter?
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The game's current rules require both the theater and specious legal framing, so there's no sense in making moral judgements about players making the only moves available to them to acheive any goals. Over sixty years ago Arthur Miller wrote many good essays in which he complained about the increasing and irreversible theatrification of American politics, so while one can lament the state of affairs, it makes zero sense to lament it as it it were anything new or temporary. Commentators like Noonan and De Rugy are supposed to be experienced and savvy enough to understand this and communicate to their audiences the real background constraints and broader agenda and that it is a rookie error to naively take many of these claims at face value and therefore ridiculous to go on to criticize them on the basis of that mistaken assumption. But no, the old bulls who are supposed to know about matadors and their tricks still somehow can't help themselves and will keep chasing the capes instead of the matadors.
Arnold quotes deRugy: "While executive action can set the tone and signal priorities, it is a weak substitute for genuine reform. Without congressional backing, most executive-led initiatives are easily reversed." In fact, congressional backing currently cannot be had due the slim Republican majority in the House (some of whom would not support substantial reform), and 60 vote requirement in the Senate. In the meantime, DOGE is a great way to cut off the huge Democrat grift to their supporters and educate the public on the deep corruption of the Uniparty. This might eventually lead to a Congress made up of those who would support genuine reform. The problem is that most members of Congress cannot raise sufficient campaign funds from small or individual donors and must rely on funding from predatory interest groups.
Overcoming the filibuster would be less of an issue with better political organization. The one big mass of media consumers is not the same as the "little platoons" that used to make up civil society. To get a lot of things done republicans need organizations that can flex, at minimum, tens of millions or even low millions of people to do things in support of narrow issues at the right times and in the right places. This is not generally something that the electronic media organs can do by themselves.
I wonder if it's a real policy debate taking the form of the activist social media nonsense that we see all over the internet today... simply because THAT is a major avenue of information transmission.
Look at CNN/MSNBC/The Daily Signal/The Atlantic. Observe how much time and peace they give to essentially ephemeral online developments, simply because that is where people's attention is.
I'll take the Trump/Vance/Musk et al show over the Harris/Walz horror show I imagine we would have gotten had the election gone the other way. Pass the popcorn.
I share your (and Vero's) misgivings but there is one plus to the DOGE effort you didn't mention - cutting and eliminating only works in one direction. The major questions doctrine is a very good brake on unilateral expansion of federal power, as Biden learned to his chagrin. So expanding the executive power to cut and not do things strikes me as largely a tool only those who want to shrink government can use effectively. There are other aspects of Trump's expansion of executive power that can likely be used by the left to expand government in the future (assuming they hold up, which I think is a big assumption - the SCT seems pretty serious about restoring the balance of power among the branches), but the DOGE effort at more transparency, cutting employees, and cutting programs all seem like a one way ratchet to me.
Congress is a dead branch of government, and its death relates to its delegation of its own authority to the quasi fourth branch of government. Some of this derives to our bad method of permanent legislation, which is not in fact mandated by the Constitution. All statutes should be subject to continuous renewal, revision, and review. This would both give Congress something to do while necessarily reducing its overall footprint. Outside of the military institutions, Congress shouldn't be in the business of fabricating institutions out of whole cloth that the entire nation needs to sacrifice for until they become thoroughly mismatched to reality.
It sounds like Trump/DOGE is pretty serious about getting rid of the Department of Education.
I would say that education is my #1 issue. We just went under contract on a house in Florida because I want to live somewhere with educational choice. But federal oversight can always interfere and the simple fact is that our private school is still going to have to recruit from the overall pool of teachers and so if that is mostly progressive its going to have an impact.
Will getting rid of the Department of Education impact the budget deficit. Barely. But it might make my life a lot better.
Arnold claims he wrote in Milei for President, who campaigned with a chainsaw. And after a sharp drop in GDP, Argentina has more Econ growth & lower inflation than any published economist predicted 3 or more years ago.
Trump & DOGE are far far closer to that than you predicted. The advantage of being a pessimist is either 1) you’re right, things are bad (be happy, right), or
2) you’re wrong, things are good (be happy, things good).
It’s irrational to let your personal hatred for Trump make you fall to see DOGE is doing as realistically great as Musk is also doing in Space launches. More pessimism now rather than other times since the 2020 stolen election seems silly, childish.
It’s very true that real cuts in long term govt will require Congress, and responsible laws. That’s pretty hard with dishonest & irresponsible elites. But solutions need to be based on knowing the problems. PR transparency is already far better than before—and shutting off the info flow will be hard for the lying Dems (&Reps) in the near future.
I’m feeling much better. If half of the $2 trillion deficit was waste & fraud that is cut, reducing the total GNP by reducing the GNP 0 value paid work, that’s better than I expected. Already far better.
I wonder if it will help Republicans win in the long run (defined in this case as the 2026 elections for Congress). Will people go, "All that noise and look how little money actually was saved." I strongly suspect that will be a message the media will be pushing.
In the even longer run, that might be positive. "DOGE didn't work. Painful measures will have to be taken." At the moment, people think that government can do way more than it can sustainably do.
There’s a learning component to DOGE. We learn where our money is going and we start asking more questions. Whoever is in control can say, “See how poorly the other team is spending your money.”
On Lex Fridman's podcast, Marc Andreesen commented about DOGE efforts and the "how little money" point - he noted that even the "small" numbers of things they were cancelling would often add up to $100 for the average taxpayer if divided up evenly and that for most people an extra $100 a month meant a night out with their partners, etc. I suspect the "it isn't saving that much" argument resonates with budget nerds (ie readers of this substack) and not with ordinary people.
In billions of dollars, US exporters paid 370 to foreign governments in tariffs, while the USA got 70. 370 to 70 is unfair. Those against Trump tariffs more than against tariffs of other countries seem … unfair. Or worse. Trump’s gut looks better, and more honest, than the thinkers who don’t tell the important true facts about real tariffs today.
I too have doubts about how much Trump will actually cut, DOGE or not. I will not be surprised if each year's budget is bigger than the previous. Reagan's reputation belies the reality of doubling the national debt. Trumpistas like to blame COVID spending on the Democrat-controlled Congress, but he didn't even veto their spending and make them take personal responsibility for their votes. If he wants credit for bills he signs, he gets blame for them too.
I also have no doubt it would have been worse under Harris.
In which case, performers serve a very useful service. They push ideas that don't depend on the politics of the day. They aren't boxed in by "My guys are in power so I have to agree with what they're doing" or "My guys are out of power so I have to agree with all their complaints."
Both of those sell out truth. I can imagine few things worse than a society where everyone feels obligated to either agree with everything Trump does, or to agree with everything the Democratic National Committee says.
Don’t we all realize that DOGE will not, acting independently, result in serious budget reductions and elimination of federal programs and agencies that were created by Congress? However, DOGE is demonstrating a few key facts — substantial corruption may be the norm, there is no real oversight of these programs by either Congress or the Executive Branch, no accountability, no meaningful metrics to judge program effectiveness, and, sometimes, funding two or more programs that work at cross purposes. In short, DOGE is more of an attempt to educate the public about the realities of how the federal government actually works and create momentum for deep budget cuts when a crisis forces action.
I don’t know if it is intentionally educational but it is effective.
Relatedly, I think the “numbers are small overall ” folks should consider that chimps and men share 99% DNA similarity. That’s statistically significant!
1. The fraud corruption may be a small part of overall govt spending that includes social security, but it may be a substantial chunk of discretionary and Medicare spending. That is, it’s a big chunk of everything thing government actively works on rather than just passively cuts checks for.
2. It really doesn’t matter the size if it’s is effectively politicians funneling money to themselves through NGOs set up like proverbial shell companies. It’s basically welfare for rich snobs. Abolish it.
3. Abolish was theater of its time and wholly ineffective.
A budget is a limit… the amount it is thought needs to be spent to achieve certain objectives. It is not the amount that HAS to be spent.
In bureaucracies this year’s budget will be based on last year’s spending plus an allowance for inflation. If last year’s spending was, say, 15% less than budgeted, this years’s budget will be reduced - the horror! A nightmare scenario for bureaucrats.
Reward in bureaucracies is grade based. Each grade level and reward (remuneration, plus benefits, plus privileges) is determined by size of establishment: how many reportees, how big the budget. In order to go up a grade, the establishment/budget responsibility has to increase. This is a disincentive for increased labour productivity and reduction of operational expenses.
Labour productivity: the amount of labour input to produce a unit of output. Increased productivity means reducing labour input per unit of output. Successfully companies have this as a main aim, because it reduces costs therefore increases profits, and/or allows lower pricing to gain increased turnover which boosts profits. Successful bureaucracies as their main aim, reduced labour productivity and reduced efficiency.
In Government, politicians - and the grand public - do not understand the concept of labour productivity or overall efficiency - maximum out for minimum input.
Therefore in order to get more out, MORE! money MUST! be spent and more people employed delivering whatever they are supposed to deliver. Therefore, plans to cut funding, reduce personnel is political suicide because this must mean LESS of whatever the grand public thinks it’s getting from the State from its taxes.
Bureaucrats know this which is why their primary aim is to expand establishment by introducing procedures which slow down throughput and cause backlogs, hire more staff to trip over each other, and find new areas that need more bureaucracy… like climate change, gender nonsense.
It is quite extraordinary how little this is understood.
There's a 1974 Impoundment Control Act which requires all money allocated to be spent during the fiscal year. The Supreme Court has upheld it.
Or so I remember the last time this came up.
Allocated is not the same as budgeted. For example, a budget may allow for expenditure on new equipment of, say $200 000, in the budgetary period, but only $150 000 might be actually allocated for equipment on order part way through the budget, $50 000 kept back in case more is needed later on. The UK has a National Health Service (NHS) which is a bureaucracy funded by annual fixed budgets out of taxation. For historic reasons, the UK financial year ends on 04 April and so the NHS budget period ends on that date. Any budgeted money unspent is no longer available and cannot be carried forward. The amount actually used from this year’s budget is the bases for calculating next.
It is usual for suppliers to receive a flurry of orders in February and March from hospitals to order things - equipment and particularly consumables - for delivery after 04 April. These prospective purchases are then entered in the accounts and funds “allocated” from the current budget, but won’t come out if the next year’s budget. It’s the trick bureaucrats use to maintain budgeting levels to provide the base for next budget round as I outlined above. It is probably why there was a Supreme Court case as somebody was trying to stop what amounts to defrauding the public purse.
Thanks. I hadn't thought about the difference.
Yes, indeed, everybody seems pretty happy with the status quo and not in the least worried about the US’s financial situation.
Trump has pared back the DOGE chain saw to a hatchet and now to a scalpel. And now he is encouraging funding for the rest of the year that cuts nothing. No rescission bill introduced.
Congress is loathsomely pathetic. The Social Security Fairness Act (https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/retirement/social-security-fairness-act.html?tl=0 )
was just signed into law as of January 5 of this year thereby increasing the 75 year actuarial deficit by 0.04 percent. Couch change. (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60876 ). And Congress is even now debating whether to repeal the existing ban on Medicare coverage of weight loss drugs used solely for weight loss purposes, a move CBO suggests might cost around $35 billion. Couch change. (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60816 ).
And everybody is attacking Musk from both left and right, courts and congress, for even attempting to reduce a little spending here and there.
Unfortunately DOGE got hung up on attacking “waste.”
If there was anybody the least bit interested in the country’s financial future, we wouldn’t be worrying about waste, we would be repealing and rescinding funding for everything that is not an essential, high priority mission that is properly in the competence of the federal government. That includes every one of the thousands of half-decent brain fart programs and agencies that a congressman managed to get enacted over the last 100 years. Just scrolling through the table of contents of each volume of the United States Code one comes across hundreds of silly little well meaning programs that don’t cost a lot and fly under the radar but in the aggregate suffocate the nation.
Here is a list of 441 federal agencies: https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies And congress claims to exercise oversight authority. Buffoons. Propose to repeal even the cheapest and lowliest one and everyone on both left and right will defend it to the death with all sorts of flim-flammery about how “doing this will not solve the budget problem” or “this proposal is not part of an orderly process and would better accomplished following the highly efficacious model of the Grace Commission.” Or offering one of ten thousand other blue sky alternatives that has failed every previous time attempted and has no chance of being enacted whatsoever.
Milton Friedman wanted to abolish departments. Great. How many did he get abolished? No, Milton Friedman’s great legacy, the all volunteer standing military, is now costing us over $500 bilion annually in military retirement benefits.
Nope. Please someone, show me a politician who is behaving seriously about reform. I can’t name a one.
The reason is perhaps foundational in that the US Constitution as extensively described in the Federalist Papers is designed so that the central government has unlimited powers of taxation and debt and a standing army to keep a boot on the throat of any in the population so unwise as to protest the plunder (domestic enemies).
When the whole sorry mess finally collapses, those who seek to rebuild might want to consider building up from the municipality and county level and not giving the central government any tax, spending, or judicial authority at all.
It will all only be performative until the people of the country start over again from scratch.
There's something in here that I want to point to as unhealthy about the way we generally think about government spending.
> And Congress is even now debating whether to repeal the existing ban on Medicare coverage of weight loss drugs used solely for weight loss purposes, a move CBO suggests might cost around $35 billion.
-
But we know that obesity drastically reduces health and (shockingly) increases health care costs.
So this would be seem to me to be a welfare-enhancing policy with a good chance of saving money.
I get, and generally agree with the desire to cut government. But largely this debate shows that there's a goldilocks zone.
1. There's a lot of pretty obvious targets for cuts. And people will pillory cutters (e.g. DOGE) for even trying to do anything. You're not trying hard enough, you're gonna fail, blah blah blah.
2. There are lots of people who in their desire for cuts, will target things that shouldn't necessarily be cut.
“… for all the talk about cutting government waste and fraud, the DOGE-Trump team seems mostly animated by rooting out leftist culture politics and its practitioners in Washington.“
Going out on a limb here… d’you think the former may be the result of the latter?
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The game's current rules require both the theater and specious legal framing, so there's no sense in making moral judgements about players making the only moves available to them to acheive any goals. Over sixty years ago Arthur Miller wrote many good essays in which he complained about the increasing and irreversible theatrification of American politics, so while one can lament the state of affairs, it makes zero sense to lament it as it it were anything new or temporary. Commentators like Noonan and De Rugy are supposed to be experienced and savvy enough to understand this and communicate to their audiences the real background constraints and broader agenda and that it is a rookie error to naively take many of these claims at face value and therefore ridiculous to go on to criticize them on the basis of that mistaken assumption. But no, the old bulls who are supposed to know about matadors and their tricks still somehow can't help themselves and will keep chasing the capes instead of the matadors.
Arnold quotes deRugy: "While executive action can set the tone and signal priorities, it is a weak substitute for genuine reform. Without congressional backing, most executive-led initiatives are easily reversed." In fact, congressional backing currently cannot be had due the slim Republican majority in the House (some of whom would not support substantial reform), and 60 vote requirement in the Senate. In the meantime, DOGE is a great way to cut off the huge Democrat grift to their supporters and educate the public on the deep corruption of the Uniparty. This might eventually lead to a Congress made up of those who would support genuine reform. The problem is that most members of Congress cannot raise sufficient campaign funds from small or individual donors and must rely on funding from predatory interest groups.
Overcoming the filibuster would be less of an issue with better political organization. The one big mass of media consumers is not the same as the "little platoons" that used to make up civil society. To get a lot of things done republicans need organizations that can flex, at minimum, tens of millions or even low millions of people to do things in support of narrow issues at the right times and in the right places. This is not generally something that the electronic media organs can do by themselves.
I wonder if it's a real policy debate taking the form of the activist social media nonsense that we see all over the internet today... simply because THAT is a major avenue of information transmission.
Look at CNN/MSNBC/The Daily Signal/The Atlantic. Observe how much time and peace they give to essentially ephemeral online developments, simply because that is where people's attention is.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-euphemism-treadmill
I'll take the Trump/Vance/Musk et al show over the Harris/Walz horror show I imagine we would have gotten had the election gone the other way. Pass the popcorn.
I share your (and Vero's) misgivings but there is one plus to the DOGE effort you didn't mention - cutting and eliminating only works in one direction. The major questions doctrine is a very good brake on unilateral expansion of federal power, as Biden learned to his chagrin. So expanding the executive power to cut and not do things strikes me as largely a tool only those who want to shrink government can use effectively. There are other aspects of Trump's expansion of executive power that can likely be used by the left to expand government in the future (assuming they hold up, which I think is a big assumption - the SCT seems pretty serious about restoring the balance of power among the branches), but the DOGE effort at more transparency, cutting employees, and cutting programs all seem like a one way ratchet to me.
Congress is a dead branch of government, and its death relates to its delegation of its own authority to the quasi fourth branch of government. Some of this derives to our bad method of permanent legislation, which is not in fact mandated by the Constitution. All statutes should be subject to continuous renewal, revision, and review. This would both give Congress something to do while necessarily reducing its overall footprint. Outside of the military institutions, Congress shouldn't be in the business of fabricating institutions out of whole cloth that the entire nation needs to sacrifice for until they become thoroughly mismatched to reality.
It sounds like Trump/DOGE is pretty serious about getting rid of the Department of Education.
I would say that education is my #1 issue. We just went under contract on a house in Florida because I want to live somewhere with educational choice. But federal oversight can always interfere and the simple fact is that our private school is still going to have to recruit from the overall pool of teachers and so if that is mostly progressive its going to have an impact.
Will getting rid of the Department of Education impact the budget deficit. Barely. But it might make my life a lot better.
Arnold claims he wrote in Milei for President, who campaigned with a chainsaw. And after a sharp drop in GDP, Argentina has more Econ growth & lower inflation than any published economist predicted 3 or more years ago.
Trump & DOGE are far far closer to that than you predicted. The advantage of being a pessimist is either 1) you’re right, things are bad (be happy, right), or
2) you’re wrong, things are good (be happy, things good).
It’s irrational to let your personal hatred for Trump make you fall to see DOGE is doing as realistically great as Musk is also doing in Space launches. More pessimism now rather than other times since the 2020 stolen election seems silly, childish.
It’s very true that real cuts in long term govt will require Congress, and responsible laws. That’s pretty hard with dishonest & irresponsible elites. But solutions need to be based on knowing the problems. PR transparency is already far better than before—and shutting off the info flow will be hard for the lying Dems (&Reps) in the near future.
I’m feeling much better. If half of the $2 trillion deficit was waste & fraud that is cut, reducing the total GNP by reducing the GNP 0 value paid work, that’s better than I expected. Already far better.
Not tired of winning, not at all. Not even close.
DOGE helps the Republicans win and makes the Democrats look bad. In the long run we need more substance.
I wonder if it will help Republicans win in the long run (defined in this case as the 2026 elections for Congress). Will people go, "All that noise and look how little money actually was saved." I strongly suspect that will be a message the media will be pushing.
In the even longer run, that might be positive. "DOGE didn't work. Painful measures will have to be taken." At the moment, people think that government can do way more than it can sustainably do.
There’s a learning component to DOGE. We learn where our money is going and we start asking more questions. Whoever is in control can say, “See how poorly the other team is spending your money.”
On Lex Fridman's podcast, Marc Andreesen commented about DOGE efforts and the "how little money" point - he noted that even the "small" numbers of things they were cancelling would often add up to $100 for the average taxpayer if divided up evenly and that for most people an extra $100 a month meant a night out with their partners, etc. I suspect the "it isn't saving that much" argument resonates with budget nerds (ie readers of this substack) and not with ordinary people.
Good heavens, I hope DOGE isn’t planning on getting into the stimulus check game.
It’s very disappointing that few critics of Trump tariffs are willing to tell the truth.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/03/treasury-secretary-u-s-is-detoxing-from-addiction-to-excessive-federal-spending/
In billions of dollars, US exporters paid 370 to foreign governments in tariffs, while the USA got 70. 370 to 70 is unfair. Those against Trump tariffs more than against tariffs of other countries seem … unfair. Or worse. Trump’s gut looks better, and more honest, than the thinkers who don’t tell the important true facts about real tariffs today.
It's very disappointing that fans of Trump don't understand tariffs and trade balances.
Tariff wars are like cutting your children to tell your neighbor to stop cutting his children.
I too have doubts about how much Trump will actually cut, DOGE or not. I will not be surprised if each year's budget is bigger than the previous. Reagan's reputation belies the reality of doubling the national debt. Trumpistas like to blame COVID spending on the Democrat-controlled Congress, but he didn't even veto their spending and make them take personal responsibility for their votes. If he wants credit for bills he signs, he gets blame for them too.
I also have no doubt it would have been worse under Harris.
politics is show business for ugly people
it's just a choice of which genre you prefer
failure theatre vs winning theatre
because what % of federal employees did Friedman and De Rugy fire when they were in gov?
Friedman famously refused to take any government position. He knew it would compromise his ability to speak his mind.
exactly my point
friedman was a performer
In which case, performers serve a very useful service. They push ideas that don't depend on the politics of the day. They aren't boxed in by "My guys are in power so I have to agree with what they're doing" or "My guys are out of power so I have to agree with all their complaints."
Both of those sell out truth. I can imagine few things worse than a society where everyone feels obligated to either agree with everything Trump does, or to agree with everything the Democratic National Committee says.