Galbraith's Bezzle
The mark is waking up
Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex.
Data science has accomplished wonderful things outside of government.
Why wouldn’t we apply it to government? Why hasn’t this happened before?
‘This is where AI comes in. The idea is to use predictive models to find providers that show the marks of questionable payment. “You want to look for providers who make a lot more money than everyone else, or providers who bill a specialty code that nobody else bills,” Leder-Luis says, naming just two of many anomalies the models might look for. In a 2024 study by Leder-Luis and colleagues, machine-learning models achieved an eightfold improvement over random selection in identifying suspicious hospitals.
‘The government does use some algorithms to do this already, but they’re vastly underutilized and miss clear-cut fraud cases, Leder-Luis says. Switching to a preventive model requires more than just a technological shift. Health-care fraud, like other fraud, is investigated by law enforcement under the current “pay and chase” paradigm. “A lot of the types of things that I’m suggesting require you to think more like a data scientist than like a cop,” Leder-Luis says.’
‘Deregulation by Firings’: Breaking Down the Cuts to Financial Oversight
The New York Times has opinions about deregulatory efforts.
‘But Mr. Trump’s plan to shrink the federal work force through buyouts and mass firings could complicate the ability of regulators to do their jobs and is neutering those agencies. On Tuesday evening dozens of employees at the consumer bureau and the Small Business Administration were fired.’
DRAIN THE SWAMP Act seeks to move DC bureaucracy ‘out of crazy town,’ House DOGE leader says
Should the agencies be embedded with the people they serve, at least in part? How would this affect their approach to doing business?
‘The bill aims to require that federal agency heads relocate about one-third of headquarters-based employees "outside the Beltway" while finding ways to save taxpayer money through moves like selling underused Washington, D.C., office space.’
How Trump’s assault on bureaucracy could rock Virginia elections
This may be linear thinking. Time will tell if the GOP advances in Virginia abate.
‘Virginia Democrats have a new message for the tens of thousands of federal workers who will vote in their state elections this fall: Republicans stood by silently as President Donald Trump came for your jobs.
‘The state’s off-year races are often a bellwether for the national mood a year before the midterms. But they are poised to take on even more significance this November because so many government employees and contractors who live in Northern Virginia are experiencing firsthand the impact of the Trump administration’s attempt to shrink the federal bureaucracy.’
Democracy and bureaucracy are governance models that can be complementary or they can stand in opposition to one another.
However, the opposite of democracy is always bureaucracy in one form or another.
‘If the people cannot vote, and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the senate and the house, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. ‘
The Democrats' Bureaucracy Problem
The Administration is building political capital by making hard choices.
I say this not to be political but to highlight that they will do more of this. They will continue until pressing the lever no longer rewards them.
The more protests there are in defense of the bureaucracy, the more action this Administration will take.
‘And unsurprisingly, anti–foreign aid sentiment runs highest among working-class voters, precisely the people who have been defecting from the Democrats to Trump, and without whose votes the party cannot recover. Cutting foreign aid spending is about ten points more popular among voters without college degrees than among the college-educated.
‘Given these realities, it makes sense for Trump and Musk to go after foreign aid spending, as an exemplar of misallocated government resources that need to be “reevaluated and realigned.” This is particularly the case since it isn’t hard to find examples of USAID programs that appear to have strayed far afield from standard priorities like food, medicine and technical assistance. One example of many is a $1,500,000 grant to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities, by promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for LGBTQI+ people in Serbia.”’
Goodbye to the roaring twenties of regulation? A cost roundup
How stimulative would massive de-regulation be?
‘So, where the first two decades of the century brought some $205 billion in annualized costs, the first four years of this decade alone have added the aforementioned $77 billion. That’s a pace worthy of the roaring twenties moniker. The recent election of Trump presumably interrupts this surge—assuming Trump’s own “swamp things” like trade, antitrust and artificial intelligence interventions don’t flip the script.’
Trump Advisers Eye Bank Regulator Consolidation After Targeting CFPB
The cluster of regulation of financial services is cumbersome, slow, and unimaginative.
Here’s to a more creative, nimble approach.
‘In recent discussions, Trump advisers and allies have examined whether it is possible to collapse the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. into the Treasury Department, according to people familiar with the matter. They have also discussed combining the FDIC’s regulatory role with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency under Treasury.
‘The Trump administration has already taken aim at one financial regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. President Trump over the weekend installed Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, as acting head of the CFPB. Alongside the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, Vought moved at breakneck speed to close the CFPB headquarters and order staff to halt work.’
Democrats Stand Up for the Bureaucrats Against DOGE
Why is this happening?
‘Choosing to die on the hill of the right of permanent government officials to spend money without hindrance from the president’s delegates is an especially odd decision. I’m trying to picture the voter who is currently sitting at home rooting for the employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Internal Revenue Service.’
Trump needs legislation now.
Maybe the plan is:
1. Seize and maintain the initiative with DOGE and executive orders, making tangible progress that you communicate frequently and clearly to the US public
2. Leverage this success into significant Congressional gains in 2026
3. Legislate on the back nine holes of the administration’s term
‘By contrast, the great bulk of Trump’s actions so far have been unilateral executive decisions, such as executive orders and efforts through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to reduce the government workforce and eliminate wasteful spending. Predictably, the latter efforts have run into a wall of resistance from federal employees, in the form of noncompliance and press offensives and lawsuits.
‘The “Deep State” of the permanent federal workforce has time on its side, and in some cases, it has the law on its side, too. Those who want to continue implementing policies against the president’s will believe, or hope, that they can wait him out. Trump and Musk believe, or hope, that they can create new facts on the ground that are hard for the next administration to undo.’
DOGE doesn’t need to make spending decisions. They can generate the political capital for elected leadership to kill programs. DOGE is the US Digital Service but with effective leadership and superstar staffing.
‘For his part, Mr. Musk is having a blast. On his social media site X, he regularly trolls critics. Earlier this month, for example, he asked a simple question: “Would you like @DOGE to audit the IRS?”’
Senator Chris Murphy’s Embarrassing DOGE Paranoia
Methinks he doth protest too much.
‘The dastardly anti-democratic act here involves a democratically elected president asking one of his advisers to review the federal government for efficiencies. Saving federal money, by the way, isn’t ordinarily considered “theft.” But Murphy, whose tinny and hysterical anti-Musk advocacy is the best Democrats have at the moment, gets points for creativity, if not for persuasiveness.
‘There are legitimate legal issues regarding Musk’s reorganization of federal agencies on the fly, but Murphy isn’t content simply to raise questions about those, not when we are witnessing “the billionaire takeover of government” and “the evisceration of democracy.”’
The End of Crypto’s ‘Choke Point’
Even Barney Frank wasn’t safe.
How can the US make it difficult to replicate in the future?
‘But debanking did happen, and we must understand how and why to make sure it doesn’t happen again. President Trump took an important step last month when he issued an executive order prohibiting any future “Operation Choke Point” activities—which is how regulators under President Biden forced banks to deny services to digital-asset firms. Congress will continue the effort this week when the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee hold hearings to investigate the debanking that took place during the last administration.’
Trump’s War on Paper Straws Is About Much More Than Straws
There’s an old t-shirt slogan I remember from the Royal Canadian Navy.
“There are two kinds of ships: submarines and targets.”
Submarines are boats, but I digress.
The Administration has a surfeit of unpopular things to undo.
‘The president wouldn’t have so much to take aim at here if Democrats hadn’t provided him with such a target-rich environment. The Democratic Party’s “War on Things That Work” was a multi-theater campaign that justified making your life perceptibly more complicated and expensive in the pursuit of illusory environmental objectives.’
School Choice Revs Up Again in the States
This shouldn’t be this hard.
‘School choice has been on a roll in Republican-led states, and the momentum is continuing this year in some of the laggards. That’s all the more important after the demoralizing recent national test score results.
‘The number of private school choice programs in the country grew to 81 from 65 from 2020-2024, according to the education nonprofit EdChoice. But only 33 states have choice programs, which means there are many more children and parents to liberate from lousy union schools. Here’s where the action is in the states so far this year:’