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Notes -
Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
Depends on what you mean by 'purposefully crude'. Most government-waste-cutting enthusiasts have a dubious understanding of the causes of government inefficiency, have an ideological presupposition that government spending is a waste, and have never heard the term 'market failure'. The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence. My view is that "they have no idea what they're doing" is significantly more likely than deliberate clumsiness.
There's a side problem wherein the major drivers of government spending are politically untouchable but you need to grandstand about how you're making cuts so you attack the Everything Else bucket even though it tends to be short-sighted penny-wise behavior.
Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina or Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff? The government workers I know tell me it’s a joke and few people work hard. (True of white collar private sector too)
No, but then, Argentina is not the US.
Twitter is a billionaire vanity project (or alternatively, an influence op). It is markedly worse as a service post Musk takeover and sacking 80% of the staff hasn't made it any less unprofitable.
The divisions of Twitter where 80% of the staff were sacked stopped functioning (temporarily in the case of HR and finance, permanently and deliberately in the case of content moderation, permanently and accidentally in the case of ad sales). The actual numbers haven't been published, but my read is that only about 25% of the core technical staff were sacked.
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