Twelve O'Clock High
If DOGE fails, the bureaucracy will know they cannot be contained. No pressure.
If DOGE doesn’t succeed, then they’ll never be able to tame the Leviathan.
‘It has been this way for TOO LONG. The voters this time have demanded change, and mustered the faith to believe that change is possible. This is precisely what DOGE is attempting, to make good on a promise, a promise that for once the voters actually believed was credible. They simply must succeed. There might never be another chance. The way of failure is the path everyone knows the US was on, toward economic stagnation, political scolerosis [sic], and eventual irrelevance in the unfolding of the next stage of social evolution.’
Trump DOGE order directs agencies to build tech to track government spending
How is this controversial?
How hasn’t this been done before?
What happens if they make all this data public?
‘In an executive order issued Wednesday, President Donald Trump directed agency heads to work with Department of Government Efficiency team leads to build centralized tech systems to record all payments issued through each agency contract or grant — as well as “written justification” for each payment submitted.’
GSA takes ‘sledgehammer’ to workforce with planned layoffs
What happens if the GSA keeps on functioning after all these cuts? What does that mean?
‘“They’re just swinging the ‘sledgehammer’ and seeing what happens at this point,” said one current GSA employee not authorized to speak on the record. “There is already a tangible impact on continuity of operations, interagency commitments that GSA is failing to meet, and frustration / distrust among our agency partners.”
‘Another said that the “once innovative culture” at GSA has been “decimated,” and employees — who no longer trust their leadership — are “holding on for each other.”’
Over-regulation Creates More Problems Than It Solves: California
California tries to ban everything tobacco, including alternative products that led to a reduction in smoking.
Cue the unintended consequences.
‘The unfortunate reality is that bans on legal products only create additional problems that can surpass the problems they were intended to solve. There is now an abundance of literature providing clear evidence that the availability of reduced-risk products is an effective tool in helping adult smokers transition away from combustible cigarettes. The right pathway forward is to understand these issues and consider both the science and the needs of the entire community instead of experimenting with laws and regulations that attempt to carve out one aspect of the problem as a solution to all. States that model prohibition in tobacco control like California should also expect the negative unintended consequences that follow.’
New legislation would increase reserves for stable coins.
Apparently this is bad for some people.
‘The STABLE Act is stricter on reserve requirements, allowing insured deposits, US T-bills, treasury short-term repo and central banks reserves. The Senate bill allows money market funds and reverse repos. Either way, higher reserve requirements would potentially be good news for NYC-based Circle while causing some trouble for BVI Switzerland Hong Kong El Salvador-based Tether, its larger rival. Tether’s self-reported reserves would only be 66 per cent compliant under the STABLE act and 83 per cent compliant under the GENIUS act, per JPMorgan data.’
BofA CEO: Over-Regulation Bars Customers From Banking System
Moynihan tries to rebut the debanking charges by pointing to regulation.
‘“At the heart of the issue is potentially the lack of a clear, comprehensive regulatory framework to address the unique risks posed by the FinTech and cryptocurrency industries,” that report said. “Financial institutions, tasked with navigating a labyrinth of overlapping and often contradictory rules themselves, can commonly be left with little incentive to take on high-risk clients when the compliance burden could outweigh any potential gains.”’
DOGE Lawsuits May Occasion Scalia’s Revenge
Great line from John Yoo.
‘At its essence, the legal fight over Mr. Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency is about the extent of a president’s executive power. Scalia insisted that the division of power among three separate, coequal branches of government was the key to American liberty. Over the decades, Congress and the courts have eroded the president’s authority over his own branch—and Mr. Trump is trying to claw it back.
‘“Trump’s executive orders and DOGE may go further in restoring the original vision of presidential power than anything even nine Antonin Scalias on the Supreme Court would have conceived,” says Berkeley law professor John Yoo. “Unlike the past, Trump today is playing on a friendly legal ground, with a Congress that agrees with him, and a pro-executive Supreme Court. Agencies and officers that go to court to resist the president will join the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the dustbin of history.”’
Could Trump’s War on the Bureaucracy Help Fix Congress?
Nothing here is inconsistent with traditional conservative thinking.
‘These speculative fears are not entirely unfounded. On balance, however, the Trump administration’s reforms are a vital component of an effort to restore accountability to the runaway federal bureaucracy, and they are long overdue. Nor can they be called “radical,” as some maintain. As AEI’s Yuval Levin wrote of the president’s executive order limiting the authority of “independent regulatory agencies,” the initiative represents “the natural completion of the regulatory reform Ronald Reagan launched with Executive Order 12291 44 years ago, almost to the day, back in 1981.” Likewise, the Trump administration’s “structural deregulation” campaign, which includes compelling executive agencies to submit to an Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs audit of their directives to ensure the executive branch is not legislating via regulation, is just basic civic hygiene.
‘These are not Trumpian priorities. Curtailing the impertinence of the executive agencies operating under the delusion that they derived some authority that did not devolve from the president himself is a long-standing conservative priority. Nor would the Founders regard any of this as exceptional. Regardless of whether Trump should attack the notion of independent agencies, inspectors general, Humphrey’s Executor, and a host of other precedents limiting the president’s agency, no student of Madisonian government could be surprised to see one branch of the federal government seeking to secure as much power for itself as possible. What would bewilder them is the extent to which the legislature has refused to engage in that same project. Trump’s initiatives could be salutary in that sense, too, insofar as they create incentives for Congress to be a jealous steward of its prerogatives again.’
Trump, the NLRB, and Humphrey’s Executor
This is all part of the independent agencies fight.
‘In a separate dispute, Mr. Trump is being sued for terminating Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. Ms. Wilcox calls her removal without cause a “blatant violation” of statute, as well as a 1935 precedent called Humphrey’s Executor. That’s true, as far as it goes. But in a letter to the Senate recently, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said the Justice Department “has concluded that those tenure protections are unconstitutional.”’
‘What did you do last week?’ Feds get mixed signals on whether to respond
Mayhem.
‘Over the weekend, federal employees received emails asking them to send bullet points of what they accomplished last week by midnight Monday.
‘Responses are meant to be voluntary under the privacy assessment associated with the system used to send the mass email out, although billionaire Elon Musk posted to X on Saturday that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
‘Federal employees across different agencies have gotten varying directions on whether to respond to the email, sent from the same governmentwide email address set up to offer feds a controversial deferred resignation offer about a week into the new administration. The privacy assessment for the system is at the center of a lawsuit against the HR agency.’
Elon Musk Wants Big Bond Market Reward for DOGE Team's Cuts
The bond market may not be as stupid as you think they are, sir.
You deliver the savings and it will not be priced in. But don’t be angry that Wall Street isn’t patting you on the head for your early work.
Let’s not underestimate the scale of the problem and the level of resistance.
‘Musk got the message loud and clear. The bond market was doubting him, demanding more evidence that the cuts were adding up fast enough to actually rein in the bloated budget deficit and curb the ever-growing national debt. This, Musk insisted, was a mistake they’d come to regret.
‘“The bond markets do not currently reflect the savings that I’m confident we can achieve,” he said during a freewheeling, hour-long discussion he led on his social media platform, X. “If you’re shorting bonds, I think you’re on the wrong side of the bet.”’
Immunologist Yasmine Belkaid: ‘Science is in danger’
Who could have seen this coming?
‘Science is a “bystander” in a wider public distrust in institutions, Belkaid argues. “I think it’s not that people don’t believe in science — they just don’t believe in the system. So we can play a role — but until this trust is rebuilt at a higher level, we alone can do very little.”