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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34033 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Noah Smith thinks DOGE's purpose is to drive liberals out of the civil service, to make room for conservative hires. Three paragraphs from below the paywall of today's post:

It seems clear that defeating the “woke mind virus” is high on DOGE’s list of priorities — my guess is that it’s actually the #1 priority. Trump’s first action with regards to the civil service was to fire all the DEI staff. But woke attitudes are far more widespread than just the few people who are officially hired to work on DEI, and Trump and Musk are probably united on the need to root out as many as possible.

This is probably why Elon loudly made a big deal out of rehiring a DOGE staffer who was fired for racist tweets, despite having himself gone to war on X against people making similar tweets. Federal civil service workers are a lot harder to fire than workers at Twitter; many are on contract, and there’s a limit to how long they can be placed on administrative leave. Musk tried the gambit of offering a buyout to all federal employees, but very few took it. One relatively easy way of getting the government’s wokest staffers to quit is to make it clear that the culture of their workplace has changed, and an easy way to do that is to have guys who write stuff like “Normalize Indian hate”.

This also explains many of the programs that Elon is going after. Actual examples of fraud are few and far between, but a decent number of federal grants and other programs have either been outsourced to progressive NGOs, repurposed for “justice”-related goals, or had DEI programs attached to them. When the DOGE people talk about “waste” and “fraud”, it’s usually just progressive stuff like this (which, to be fair, they do consider wasteful).

This seems to fit the available evidence, but what would prove or disprove it? I'd be more convinced if there had been a clear effort to recruit conservatives, prior to this - driving out progressives by purposely making civil service jobs generally less appealing doesn't make me want a civil service job.

Taking my tax dollars to fund a transgender opera in Columbia is fraud to me. I'm pretty sure that whatever congress appropriated didn't say "transgender opera in Columbia" and stealing those appropriations for woke activism fits neatly into the definition of fraud.

It's not fraud. It's stupid and wasteful, but the money was probably allotted for bringing feminism and gender education to Latin America.

Unironically, this is why we need to bring back earmarks. Congress needs to go back on the record and be more prescriptive in specifying where and how appropriated funds should be spent. Congress did away with ‘pork barrel spending’ over a decade ago and the result hasn’t been a decrease in federal spending. Rather, it just relieves Congress of accountability and permits the kind of opaque ‘fraud’ exemplified here to take root.

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