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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   37963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Trump is abolishing Affirmative Action in federal contracting. He is going to order the government to pressure private companies to end Affirmative Action.

No, he's merely giving an executive order to a nominally-subordinate vast bureaucracy, ready to delay, leak, disobey, to cease these things. Whether they obey? Well…

Executive actions are executive orders. EOs have the legal force of a tweet. You can’t go to jail for disobeying a tweet, even if the President tweeted it. Or an EO.

In real life, EOs work when they order an agency to do something it wants to do. In fact, they are generally written by the agency itself. They are certainly reviewed by the agency. EOs are not written high at 3am by Elon Musk with a sharpie on a Denny’s napkin, even if they probably should be. If you know DC, can you make something happen with an EO? Of course. Depends what, though.

…

Basically, DOGE is promising to save the government money through… bureaucratic trench warfare. If you think an executive order is in any way executive, like private sector executive, like actually executive—read about how the process works.

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