Courage Is Contagious

All eyes are on Germany this week.

German 'Bureaucracy Monster' On Everyone's Election Hit List

Shocking to see the Germans(!) descrying bureaucracy.

‘German politicians make a lot of laws and regulations but on the campaign trail many rage against the country's notorious bureaucracy, labelling it a monster that needs to be slayed.

‘Whatever else divides them, almost all candidates in the February 23 vote agree with the popular idea that Europe's biggest economy needs to slash back its thicket of rules, often labelled a "jungle of paragraphs".

‘Some want to take a chainsaw to it all, inspired by Argentina's President Javier Milei and Donald Trump's "efficiency tsar" Elon Musk, even if their true intent at times may be to weaken troublesome labour or environmental standards.

‘The pro-business and small-government Free Democrats (FDP) have proposed shuttering more than 100 government agencies, which they say would streamline the administration and save billions, German media reported Tuesday.’

Show me the evidence that City deregulation will help growth

Deregulation needs to be intelligent.

‘I do not dismiss the merits of a refined regulatory regime. Our financial services industry should be given all the tools it needs to help grow our economy. This may include rebalancing risk-taking. But, as chair of the Treasury select committee, which scrutinises our biggest private and public financial institutions, I must be led by the evidence. Rhetoric and vested interests aside, where is the proof that stripping away financial services regulations will generate meaningful growth across the UK?’

Trump’s reckless experiment with financial deregulation

The article has confused causality. They laud regulators for coming to the rescue during the regional banking crisis a couple of years ago.

An alternative view suggests the opposite: regulators failed to anticipate and manage the systemic risk from the mismanagement of plain vanilla interest rate exposure.

‘Two years ago, the US was on the brink of its most serious set of bank failures since the financial storm of 2008. A clutch of regional banks, some the size of Europe’s larger lenders, hit the skids, including Silicon Valley Bank, whose demise came close to sparking a full-blown crisis. SVB’s crash had several immediate causes. Its bond holdings were crumbling in value as US interest rates pushed higher. With just a few taps on an app, the bank’s spooked and interconnected tech customer base yanked out deposits at an unsustainable pace, leaving multimillionaires crying out for federal assistance. The swift crisis-cauterising skills regulators forged in the fire of 2008 helped avert a broader financial contagion. The grim episode should loom large in the minds of US President Donald Trump’s trigger-happy, anti-regulation financial sheriffs. After all, the US Federal Reserve identified the lighter supervisory burden placed on smaller banks like SVB in his first term in 2018 as a key ingredient in its failure.’

How bureaucracy and underfunding undermine EU military mobility

Bureaucracy is a risk to national security.

‘The European Court of Auditors (ECA), the EU’s internal auditor, has determined that EU militaries are not able to move “fast enough” across the bloc territory. It blames red tape as a major obstacle. Tanks, the report notes, are barred from entering neighbouring countries because they exceed national weight limits. Convoys have been halted at bridges not designed to bear heavy equipment. ‘

Musk And DOGE: How It Will Transform Bureaucracy – OpEd

Here’s another version of the argument in favor of anti-bureaucracy contagion.

‘Musk’s influence for now is seen as both a catalyst and a symptom of broader political shifts in Europe, favouring the rise of populism and anti-establishment sentiment. Should DOGE succeed, it could have a snowball effect in the countries of the European Union (EU) grappling with socio-economic challenges and immigration debates, and where the stultifying bloat and corruption of the EU bureaucracy has been identified as choking growth and burdening the citizenry in worse ways than what the US has experienced.

‘Elsewhere in the world, countries with oversized bureaucracies that have been a drag on development and whose costs are seen as outweighing their value to the economy and society will similarly be looking for lessons to learn from DOGE. This includes Malaysia where the rightsizing of the bureaucracy has long been postponed.’

Biden DOJ Exposed the Deep State’s Underbelly

Where was all the talk of an over-eager Administration then?

‘Three days before President Trump’s second inauguration, Joe Biden’s Justice Department unwittingly handed him an opportunity to curb its abuse of federal power. The department has been using guidance—a form of agency communication that is, by law, supposed to clarify regulations, not make new ones—to coerce its enforcement targets. In its haste to enshrine this power in the federal code, the DOJ opened it to nullification under the Congressional Review Act. Lawmakers need to act quickly.

‘It’s no secret that the Biden administration abused its power of guidance. In 2021 the DOJ introduced an interim rule rescinding Trump-era restrictions on guidance, which prevented federal agencies from using guidance to impose de facto binding obligations on individuals or entities. Because the DOJ is the enforcement arm for many federal agencies, its rules determine the coercive power these agencies wield. Ideologues at federal agencies used guidance to link school-lunch funding to schools’ alignment with progressive gender and sexuality policies; to upend corporate defenses against environmental, social and governance proposals by activist shareholders; and to threaten school administrators with investigations if they didn’t adopt race-conscious disciplinary practices.

‘Knowing that Mr. Trump would try to restrict these abuses in his second term, Mr. Biden’s DOJ sought to place them outside the reach of executive orders. On Jan. 17, it made the 2021 interim rule permanent. But in doing so it exposed the policy to the Congressional Review Act, which gives lawmakers the authority to overturn recently enacted rules. Striking down a rule requires a majority vote in both chambers of Congress and either the president’s signature or a veto override. When Congress and the White House come under the control of the opposing party, overturning the previous administration’s last-minute actions becomes viable.’

California’s EV Mandate Goes to Congress for Repeal

EPA submits California EV waiver for Congressional Review.

‘The Biden Administration in December approved a waiver letting California set its own vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions standards. The Clean Air Act lets the Environmental Protection Agency grant such a waiver only to meet “compelling and extraordinary conditions.” This waiver authority was intended to help California reduce pollutants that contribute to smog.

‘But CO2 doesn’t cause smog, and California doesn’t have any more compelling need to regulate vehicle greenhouse-gas emissions than any other state. Nonetheless, the Biden EPA approved the state’s ban on new internal-combustion engine cars by 2035 and progressive “zero-emission vehicle” quotas for auto makers.

‘Zero-emission vehicles would have to account for 43% of an auto maker’s sales in 2027 in California and a dozen or so other states that have adopted its rules. This increases to 68% by 2030. Auto makers called the program an “unaccountable, unachievable regulatory wormhole” in a memo to “interested parties” in December. That is putting it gently.’