The Purge
Does anyone review government programs for efficacy? Wouldn't it show that they're doing great work?
Trump’s Best Idea: Unleashing Elon Musk on Government
Imagine you have a job in which you are held accountable for nothing. You come to work. You push some paper around. You attend meetings. You go home.
Every day, new people seem to get hired in your workplace. Maybe you know what they’re doing, what paper they’re pushing. Perhaps you even attend some of the same meetings.
Programs just accumulate.
And then one day, everything changes. Someone comes to your desk and starts asking questions. You look around and you see that other people are facing similar inquiries. You’re confused. Nobody has asked you these kinds of questions before. You don’t have the answers at their fingertips. The inquisitors are angry with your ignorance.
As the weeks roll on, you see more and more empty desks around you. Should you be concerned for your own job? What is it that you can says to these people that will keep them at bay?
‘The government paid tens of billions in fraudulent unemployment benefits and Paycheck Protection grants during the pandemic. According to the Internal Revenue Service, a California prison inmate allegedly claimed more than $550 million in Covid-era Employee Retention Tax Credits. The ERTC is one of the great Beltway boondoggles and will continue to add to the deficit with dubious payouts.
‘But there are countless other programs that run on autopilot with little evidence that they yield any results. Does anyone think federal job training works? Or the Jobs Corps? Or for that matter, Pentagon procurement?’
The Biden-Harris Subprime Bank
Loans and credit guarantees from the federal government have picked up in recent years with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act, not to mention the gamesmanship happening in the student loan space. There are $350 billion in loans that the government is handing out in the IRA alone, making the government larger than any private Greentech venture capital fund in the world.
The government gives itself regulatory relief in accounting for the risk of this credit assistance. The good news is that private entities are pulling back from this crap. The bad news is that the government is crowding them out.
‘Federal agencies play by fictional accounting rules under which they don’t account for the market risk of their loans. Look ma, no defaults. This lets bureaucrats and Congress disguise the cost of their spending. CBO thus estimates that Uncle Sam will lose a mere $2.4 billion on loans and loan guarantees issued in the 2025 fiscal year under government accounting standards.
‘Ah, but under the rules that private businesses use, the cost balloons to $65.2 billion. That’s about twice as much as in 2019. Blame Congress for creating new lending programs. Biden officials are also underwriting more debt and easing payments and credit standards for borrowers.’
Bureaucracy is despised for inefficiency and waste. But it might just save us from climate change
Did a bureaucrat write this article? To say it is tendentious is to call water wet. It is tautological in the extreme.
Bureaucracies are, we are told, Weberian paradigms. The ones that aren’t have been brought down by populist, anarchist, or fascist politicians.
They even quote an expert on bureaucracy (a meta-expert?) as saying that “electoral accountability can be a ‘double-edged sword,’ since they can unintentionally encourage short-term thinking.”
Apparently, the environmental cause requires long-term thinking that democracies struggle with. Chernobyl was an example of “incompetence and corruption.”
True bureaucracy has never been tried.
‘"Bureaucracies are designed to manage complex tasks through standardized procedures, which can indeed lead to slower decision-making processes," Sounman Hong, a distinguished professor in public policy and management at Yonsei University, told Salon. "However, this very structure also ensures consistency, accountability and fairness, which are crucial in democratic governance."
‘In short, bureaucracies are a tool, neither inherently good or evil but only as effective and virtuous as the bureaucrats who run them — and, of course, the politicians who operate over the bureaucrats.’
Banned in Brazil: The world is moving toward greater regulation of social media, experts say
Embedded in the arguments against freedom of speech is a deep-seated distrust of the common sense of the common man.
The elites do not trust the average Joe to reach the “correct” conclusion when presented with differing points of view.
Democracy dies in darkness.
‘But experts at Northeastern University say the vision of the internet as a libertarian, transnational free-speech zone where only the best ideas rise to the top is increasingly being questioned—even in the United States.
‘"Increasingly, we're seeing an evolution. Courts are rethinking libertarian free speech paradigms—rethinking this very expansive understanding of free speech online," says Elettra Bietti, assistant professor of law and computer science at Northeastern. "We have moved from a very libertarian, very hands-off approach to an increasing appetite for regulation in the digital economy."’
Startups are getting fined, or sometimes banned, by individual states
Bureaucracy and entrepreneurship are antithetical, it would seem. It must be difficult to move fast and break things if you have to fill out paper forms and mail them.
‘When startups have employees in a state, conduct an acquisition or sign up customers there, they typically need to register in the state and maintain themselves in good standing. That includes paying their state taxes and fees on an ongoing basis, Andrea Schulz, a lawyer at Grant Thorton, told TechCrunch. If they don’t, they risk being fined by the state, or other consequences.
‘The problem, experts say, is that each state has its own complex fees, tax, and business registration requirements. And state-level compliance isn’t something top-of-mind for startup founders, nor is it a priority for an early-stage founder’s precious budget dollars, Schulz said.’
Forces that Shape and Constrain Medical Practice
If you’re going to regulate organizations, you should provide the resources they need to comply. How many regulators just impose costs, knowing that they will bear none of the burden? And what are the ensuing unintended consequences of the organizations that have to bear those extra expenses?
‘There are many examples, but to name a couple: the perceived threat of liability can chill clinicians and provider organizations from doing things that would benefit patients—such as using a novel technology that doesn’t have an established track record of safety—or spur them to do things that aren’t necessarily good for patients—so-called “defensive medicine.” Imposing regulatory mandates without providing the resources to meet them can lead to health care organizations making hard choices, perhaps to patients’ detriment.’
Trump Lays Out Vision for Bending the Federal Government to His Will
Does he have a plan to do this? What is different now than in his first term? To hear him and to believe him, you must think that he learned lessons about how the civil service works, it took him four years to learn those lessons, and that he has a plan ready to execute on day one to exploit his prior experience.
Is this credible?
‘Former President Donald J. Trump vowed to vastly reshape the federal bureaucracy on Saturday in a wide-ranging, often unfocused speech at a rally in Wisconsin.
‘He pledged to ultimately eliminate the Department of Education, redirect the efforts of the Justice Department and fire civil servants charged with carrying out Biden administration policies that he disagreed with.’
Washington Gridlock Creates a Wireless Spectrum Gap
The US invented wireless technology, yet it lags its major competitors badly. One key problem is the lack of spectrum auction authority for the FCC. The problem lies in the political realm as internecine squabbling between Congressional committees, the Pentagon, and the executive hobbles renewal of this important function.
‘But there’s hope. The House Commerce Committee transcended politics and unanimously approved two spectrum auction bills in the past two years. Two other bills sit before a Senate committee. They are stalled, however, because federal agencies have no incentive to give up their airwaves. Meanwhile, Congress tussles over how to spend auction revenue. The spectrum “pipeline” has run dry simply because lawmakers of both parties can’t agree.’
Revealing the Submerged Administrative State
It’s not that the agencies are bad. It’s just that people don’t know all the goods things they do! That’s the argument from these law school professors.
Or it could be like parents during the Pandemic. Before they could listen in on the Zoom calls for their children’s classes, there was a native deference to the teachers as the pedagogical experts. Once they actually saw what was happening in the classroom, many of them weren’t happy.
Perhaps agencies operate in the shadows for a reason.
‘Although the administrative state’s role in implementing laws and government programs is well known to policy insiders, we argue that the critical work that federal agencies do is submerged—to borrow a term coined by political scientist Suzanne Mettler. That is to say, it is hidden from public view, making it difficult for Americans to perceive it or to understand its day-to-day effects on their lives. Despite agencies’ responsibility for the vast bulk of government work (including implementing statutes such as the IRA and the ACA), it is extremely difficult for even the most informed Americans to appreciate the extent to which agency actions affect their lives. As a result, Americans tend to underestimate the extent to which they benefit from government programs either because they do not recognize that they are receiving these benefits or because they are not aware that the benefits are being provided by the government. It is partly because of this submergence that the political response to several key U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions constraining the administrative state has been so muted, despite the danger that these decisions will ultimately render government less effective.’