Alchemy
Whoever figures out how to make bureaucracy more efficient will have figured out how to turn lead into gold.
Biden breaks Federal Register record
We did it, Joe.
It’s a crude measure, but this speaks to the opacity of government regulation. How do we measure how much of it exists? How do we measure it’s effectiveness? How do we assess duplication and cross-rule interference and inconsistency?
If the DOGE boys can figure out a framework for this, they will be able to sell this for hundreds of billions in consulting fees. They could make McKinsey look like an after-school program. Oh, wait.
‘Joe Biden’s administration has set a new Federal Register record with 96,088 pages as of December 3, 2024, surpassing the Obama administration’s 95,894 pages in 2016. With just weeks remaining in the year, the Register—Washington’s daily depository of proposed and final rules—is on track to exceed 100,000 pages for the first time in history.
‘As I noted in Forbes today, Federal Register page counts are a highly imperfect gauge of regulatory burden. Biden’s milestone, though, still underscores the expanding scope of federal intervention. Biden’s policies reflected a sharp departure from Trump-era efforts to streamline regulation instead embracing whole-of-government approaches to climate policy, equity, and other forms of economic and social engineering that we have detailed in Ten Thousand Commandments and elsewhere.’
Can Trump Bust Up the Beltway?
In the swamp, all is dark, musty, and decaying.
‘A reason these bureaucracies get away with so much is that so little sunlight reaches them. Notwithstanding recent concerns about “our democracy,” few reporters volunteer to build a career covering unglamorous federal agencies. It’s no surprise that, untended, Washington degraded into a swamp. Mr. Trump seems serious about pulling the plug. Like everything else about his presidency, we’ll see.’
The IRS Wants to Prep Your Tax Return
Let’s disregard the abuse of Congressional statute.
Why would the IRS want to prepare your tax return? Why are they so willing to push ahead despite the Congressional limits?
Elizabeth Warren wants to displace the tax preparation industry. So do lots of people. The only difference is those others want a massively simpler tax reporting requirement.
Is it because they want access to more private information? Seriously, what is the motivation here?
‘For a study in runaway government, take a look at Direct File, the tax-filing experiment from the Internal Revenue Service. In two years the program has grown from a $15 million study to a $114 million behemoth, despite no additional backing from Congress. The IRS wants to persuade more Americans to let the government prepare their taxes—that is, determine for you how much you owe.
‘The agency announced last month that it will expand Direct File to 12 new states for the coming filing season, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and North Carolina, adding to the 12 states where it launched earlier this year. IRS staffers are working with state governments to advertise the program to taxpayers, hoping to expand on the 140,000 who used Direct File last year. Commissioner Danny Werfel called it a “critical tool in the IRS’ effort to meet taxpayers where they are.” Yes, at their bank accounts.
‘The agency is moving quickly to outrun the law. The legal basis for Direct File is in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which gave the IRS $15 million to study whether a government filing program would be feasible. The agency was supposed to report its findings to Congress before seeking additional funding.
‘Instead, it’s funding the program on its own by siphoning cash from its other operations. That includes $50 million from its modernization effort and $38 million from a fund meant to help taxpayers with their claims.’
A tweet referring to some key readings on permitting reform in the US.
Musk’s DOGE Plans Rely on White House Budget Office. Conflicts Await.
Appointing the fellow who ran OMB in the first Trump administration to get back in the saddle, fresh from Project 2025, would be a power move. The learning curve for leadership at these agencies is steep. It was an investment the first time that needs to be exploited this time.
‘Musk and Ramaswamy encouraged Trump to reappoint as OMB director Russell Vought, who led the office during Trump’s first term, a person with knowledge of their discussions said. Trump picked Vought for the role on Nov. 22.
‘Vought contributed to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a more-than- 800-page blueprint for the incoming Republican administration. Vought wrote a chapter titled “Executive Office of the President of the United States,” explaining how he believes the director and political appointees of the OMB, and not career officials, should guide it.’
DOGE Brings the X Factor and Will Be Successful
Making what they find public so that the American people can see the inefficiencies will generate massive support for Musk and Ramaswamy. They’ll need it. There’s precedent.
‘One of the most significant budget reforms in U.S. history happened right after the end of World War I, during what we now know as the beginning of the Roaring Twenties. At that time, rampant government corruption and inefficiency had eroded public trust. Reformers, led by the New York Bureau of Municipal Research (NYB), sought to overhaul the federal budget process. Backed by industrial giants such as Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, the NYB played a key role in creating the executive budget process and establishing two essential agencies: what are today the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Management and Budget.
‘Underpinning the NYB’s successful effort was its ability to capture public attention. Leading up to the successful reform effort, in 1910 and 1911, NYB staged public exhibits that highlighted government inefficiencies and corruption, drawing large crowds. By making inefficiency a spectacle worthy of ridicule and reform, it turned an otherwise dry and technical issue into a natural priority for the American people. It sparked public buy-in. As one of the NYB’s leaders famously observed, “There are two things that make the news: one is a fight, and the other is a scandal.”’
UK legislation would enable British regulators to interfere with product design … in US companies.
Let’s see how that works out for them, Cotton.
When bureaucrats write business plans, we call it industrial policy. It’s top-down. It’s aspirational. It’s directive. They favor the large players.
It’s certainly not entrepreneurial.
‘Yet from the perspective of a small industrialist in India, who might invest in a toy factory, this is not so hard to understand. They face many hurdles. The government seems to favour large companies and advanced industries: it has offered tens of billions of dollars in so-called production-linked incentives to foster industries such as electronics and semiconductors, but these sectors are too far up the value chain for India to succeed easily, and will not create that many jobs if they do. Then there is the fear of India’s largest conglomerates, which have pushed aggressively into the digital economy, and are widely believed to enjoy political favour. Giants such as Reliance, Tata and Adani are happy to invest. The problem is further down.’
Antitrust Is the God That Fails and Fails
Holman Jenkins skewers contemporary antitrust.
‘Pure ressentiment—a French word for disguised bloody-mindedness flavored with envy—is in charge now. After a lower-court win in August, the department recently rolled out a “remedy” list seemingly aimed at hurting Google any which-way, including requiring the company to divest its Chrome browser.
‘Antitrust has become perhaps government’s least useful and productive endeavor, so vastly does today’s dynamic, liquid economy differ from the economy of 1890 when the Sherman Act was passed. But government officials don’t love the idea of their own obsolescence so antitrust must survive on a lust for ankle biting and a progressive prejudice against any kind of unhampered private decision-making.
‘Like characters out of a Mark Helprin novel who refuse the challenge of being human, today’s trustbusters have found a niche that supports their special deformity. But an antitrust so removed from reality is also an antitrust that’s helpless in the real world to produce benefits for society.
‘The proof is a shocking record of court defeats, from the Trump administration’s failed 2017 attack on the AT&T-Time Warner merger to a series of Biden humiliations involving Microsoft, Facebook-parent Meta, game makers, defense contractors and health insurers.’
Musk is the right man in the wrong continent
Bureaucracy is a tax on growth.
Sensitive to the risk that the man or woman in the marathon may falter, their guardians insist on all kinds of safeguards. What happens if you trip and fall? Let’s make sure you wear sturdier shoes. What happens if it rains? Wear rain gear. What about the possibility of a random bear attack? Well, you should probably carry some bear spray, just in case.
Pretty soon, our poor hero is trudging along at the back of the group, with the cleanup crew picking up the tables and traffic barriers behind him or her, while his more carefree competitors speed towards the finish line.
Europe struggles with growth that is too anemic to support their fiscal burden, which in turn increases as social payments try to make up for the economic weakness.
They may hate them, but Europe needs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramawamy to succeed.
‘It is Europe that must hope so, not America. A continent that is spent of ideas and confidence needs a model of reform to emulate. If anything, Musk is wasted in the US. Whatever is wrong with the federal government hasn’t kept the nation from outrageous economic success. Taxes are complex, but competitive by western standards. Public debt is high, but the issuer of the premier world currency can get away with a lot. Government intervention, on antitrust in particular, stiffened under Joe Biden, but not to a European extent. As for the “deep state”, the president, who can make around 4,000 appointments, has more control over the executive than in other democracies. Now consider Europe. Its major economies, including Britain, have tax burdens that are high by their own peacetime standards, never mind America’s. Apart from Germany, they have debt that equals or exceeds their GDP, without the exorbitant privilege of the dollar. At the same time, cutting entitlements or raising taxes is political hell, as Britain’s Labour government is learning and as Emmanuel Macron could have told them. If there is a way out of this circular trap of fiscal pressure and low growth, it is a redesign of the state from first principles.’