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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   34187 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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Now that Trump has ignored the order of a judge to unfreeze the funds he is withholding comes the first constitutional crisis. This is where checks and balances should kick in. If he brazenly defies the courts then Congress can take action against him by impeachment and removal. Hopefully.

  • -24

Do you have a link to what you're talking about?

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-violating-court-order-freezing-funding-judge-2025-2

Thank you!

The Democrats in Congress don't have the votes to impeach him though, so that indeed creates the crisis.

The Republicans in Congress may have the votes to ratify the freeze though. That resolves the issue.

Alternatively there could just be escalating contempt of court proceedings against underlings and disregard for the judiciary.

IIRC the Republicans would have to abolish the filibuster for legislation to ratify it (I presume they'd otherwise have done it already), which means that this crisis greatly increases the chances of that actually happening.

the GOP could pass the spending freeze or cuts through the reconciliation process which cannot be filibustered and was created by a Democrat controlled House and Senate in 1974 (signed by Nixon)

Enforcement is an exercise for Congress, not the courts. We have been exactly in the presumptive, possibly apocryphal, here before: “Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”.

What crisis?

Andrew Jackson is supposed to be his favorite president.

What crisis?

Isn't "constitutional crisis" a general term where the branches contradict each other and it's not clear what to do to resolve it?

The thing is that it's pretty clear what happens here: Executive tells the judge to go pound sand, and if the case eventually ends up in front of the supreme court they will certainly write it off as nonsense.

I don't see how this has any teeth.

As a thought experiment, what do you guys think it would take for Republicans in congress to impeach and convict Trump?

Like, suppose all those Reddit comments are right, and Elon really is looting billions of dollars from the treasury for his personal benefit. If Trump turns a blind eye, or even worse, pardons Elon, surely that would be enough right?

At this point I don’t think anything can. If Trump turns a blind eye and pardons Elon, I believe the base will think it’s correct/legal/not a big deal. I don’t even think murder would do it; I think there would be a spin that Trump had to do it.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it. But then he wouldn’t be Trump, so it’s kinda a moot point.

  • -20

President Clinton established that profound moral corruption was no bar to Presidential office. President Bush II established that reasonably sound moral character was insufficient to prevent disastrous misrule. President Biden killed any possible appeal to formal rule of law, and did some dancing on the grave of the moral character question in the bargain.

There aren't really a lot of valid norms remaining upright at the moment. In 2016, Democratic candidates stumped on the policy of taxing religions they didn't like and publicly laughed at the idea of Constitutional restraint for their desires. With this last election, I note that numerous Blue Tribe commentators explicitly dismissed the actual person murdered in the attempted Trump assassination, because he was a Trump supporter and therefore fair game. Likewise, one notes the Luigi fandom. If you're worried about people endorsing murder, there's no need to speculate about hypotheticals when we've got live examples around us at this very moment; likewise for other forms of extremism.

I think if Trump supported the LGBT population

He waved a rainbow flag once. Roy Cohn was his mentor. He weirdly petted Peter Thiel's hand in a meeting in 2016. Theil called Trump more recently and asked him to select Vance as VP. No one cares that Trump is fine being friends with gay guys. A journalist asked Trump which restroom a transwoman would need to use in Trump tower and he said he doesn't care.

I'm not sure if Trump "supports" them, but he doesn’t seem to be anti-gay.

Do... do you... you really believe Trump is a doctrinaire social conservative? Like he doesn't support abortion up til birth without apology, I guess that makes him a radical Christian nationalist or whatever the snarl word is now?

Trump's support among social conservatives is that he'll protect us from efforts to make it illegal to be socially conservative, not that he'll enact socially conservative policies. Nobody expected him to be even as socially conservative as he is, we just expected him to make sure the little sisters of the poor get left alone.

Yes? He’s got opposition to abortion, opposition to feminism, support for traditional family values, opposition to pornography, support for abstinence-only sex education, opposition to LGBT rights, support for school prayer, support for school vouchers, support for homeschooling, support for Sunday blue laws, opposition to gambling, and opposition to recreational drug use. Pretty socially conservative to me.

opposition to feminism

Underdefined.

opposition to pornography, support for abstinence-only sex education

Progressives decided to fight on the hill of children's book about leather daddies, but outside of schools he doesn't seem to care. Vance might.

opposition to LGBT rights

He just appointed a married gay Huguenot to the Secretary of the Treasury. Lumping them all together is what generates the confusion, and contributed to the backlash that got Trump reelected.

support for school vouchers, support for homeschooling

Funny how quickly homeschooling went from left-hippy coded to right-coded.

opposition to gambling,

He owned a casino! Politicians are no stranger to hypocrisy but he doesn't seem opposed to gambling. And given the disaster that is sportsbetting, he probably should be.

Can you show me which children’s book about leather daddies you’re talking about?

Grandad's Pride, scroll down to "Reviews with pictures" if you're curious. Or here's an article with a description:

Will Taylor described two particular images in the book: ‘We identified two images of men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear. One has a leather cod-piece moulded tightly around his crotch along with garters running down his thighs. He also has a studded dog collar around his neck and knee-high boots. Both have various leather straps around their bodies and studs/spikes.’

I'm pretty live and let live and not exactly put-off by collars and garters, where appropriate. But I'm baffled by the fact anyone thought this book was a good idea, and anyone that green-lit it should be on a watchlist. I wouldn't complain about- what was it, penguins with two dads that was popular for a while? The line between encouraging acceptance and being porn-brained creep is not thin; there's a great big flashing wall between those, and yet here we are.

If you want to say conservatives abused the "groomer" thing, I'll agree. Unfortunately, there's just enough wackadoos that pull this shit and useful idiots that defend it to provide a good supply of ammunition.

More comments

Trump opposes early term abortion bans while supporting late term abortion bans, and it’s difficult to tell where the line is for him. This gives him a position quite similar to the median voter. He’s pro gay marriage but anti-transgenderism, opposes porn in school libraries but doesn’t seem to have a problem with it more generally. I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that he supports blue laws or has a particular position on gambling.

Trump is more or less a median voter on social issues who strongly supports issues which benefit his socially conservative base(like school choice and homeschooling- neither of which are particularly unpopular among the general public).

Trump made a gay married guy with gay adopted kids a treasury secretary.

Trump is not anti-LGBT per se, he's just pro owning the libs, so because libs funded the cause he froze that funding.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think if Trump supported the LGBT population, was pro-sex education, or something else very much so not socially conservative, I believe it’d do it.

Those are some interestingly selected examples. Let me go grab a big drink of water and -

cough hack

... are you intentionally trying to channel Darwin levels of being wrong for the engagement, or does this mean anything?

No, I’m not, and I don’t know why you want to insult me by saying I’m not commenting in good faith.

  • -12

Because I’ve looked at your profile page:

yes I’m addicted to downvotes every time I get one it’s like a bump of that sweet smoking gun and yes I’m into BDSM let me get into my St. Andrew’s real quick and then you can call me a troll until your throat hurts.

( I don’t downvote lightly, and this haven’t done so here yet.)

…..I feel like the joke went over your head.

I'm pretty sure I get the joke. What I'm interested in seeing is whether it's a joke in the 'ha ha, I'm going to act the exact opposite of this' sense, or in the 'ha ha, I'm going to be extra wounded if someone notices a pattern' sense.

If you'd rather we spend three posts getting to the point where you can even recognize the "or does this mean anything?" part of my post above, I think that illustrates a lot of why I'd comment the way I did.

Darwin never had a sense of humor, at least she's got that.

I'll respect our difference of opinion if you don't find it funny, but I chuckled.

I am 100% certain Trump would be impeached and removed if he was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

Besides that, I'm less sure.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters be impeached and removed from office, OK? It's, like, incredible."

Is it really that far from precedent, though? Clinton's ATF and FBI burned a bunch of women and children to death in Waco. Obama ordered drone strikes on American citizens abroad. Cheney actually shot a man while in office. Two of those successfully ran for re-election afterwards.

And when the man Cheney shot got out of the hospital, he told the press conference, "My family and I are deeply sorry for everything Vice President Cheney and his family have had to deal with."

On the one hand, it was an accident, and it's possible that the victim contributed to it by moving too far ahead of the line of hunters too soon, and legitimately felt guilty about that.

On the other hand, it was Cheney, who you can absolutely imagine walking up to the guy he just shot and stating "If you survive this, the first thing you're going to do is apologize for getting in the way of my shot."

I donno, he's rubbing shoulders with a Kennedy now. Maybe some of that Chappaquiddick magic will rub off on him.

Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.

As long as Republicans think that Trump will get them stuff they want, he's invincible on a personal level. Like all politicians, first you have to gut the support, THEN you have to run the smear campaign. That's why Cakegate in the UK only started hitting home when conservatives realised that Boris Johnson was going all-in on lockdowns and immigration. Mind you, I think that UK voters are more invested in outward good behaviour from politicians than US ones, though I don't know how long that will last.

This should be expanded upon for a top-level post.

Checks and balances does not mean that your political enemies don't get to do any of their agenda. Sometimes in a democracy things happen you don't like. The judiciary is the least democratic institution in the American republic, the least accountable. If the President defies the judiciary and Congress supports him then the President gets his way. That's the part of checks and balances you probably don't like, and that's probably how it's going to end.

I literally don’t think that’s how the government works. If I did, then I’d take the L.

The judiciary doesn't have any formal mechanism to enforce a ruling upon the executive branch other than by tradition and precedent. If he makes unlawful, unconstitutional orders, Congress has reason to impeach him. But if Congress doesn't want to impeach him, then he gets away with it. It really is that simple. What do you want the judiciary to do? Send in the US Marshals, start a civil war?

Now perhaps there's a constitutional argument to go against whatever the president is doing. Certainly you could make a case for anything. But the vesting clause is very clear that the President is endowed with the full powers of the office. The Supreme Court will not suddenly make a ruling that will formalize any sort of control on the executive branch.

Do you have an argument to bring to bear against the unitary executive? How is the presidency supposed to work? Is there a strong legal theory behind the ability of fifty state judges to have a veto over the President?

I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

The presidency works by following the proper channels of checks and balances, not spamming Executive Orders until the courts block it. I have a very hard time believing that if a Democratic president did the same behavior you would have the same reaction.

  • -16

I’m confused. You said if the President goes against the Constitution, then he should be removed. He has clearly violated the Constitution. Therefore he should be removed.

There is general agreement on this, but the question is who decides when this happens. According to the Constitution, the answer has been "Congress." As such, attempts to force this result by the judiciary are in this tradition inappropriate.

Popular presidents ignore the constitution all the time. Unless you're arguing that FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans was constitutional. The Biden administration made clear its intent to ignore the constitution when it was searching for a way to make good on its promise to make a handout to the college educated. It's unclear as to the executive branch auditing itself and controlling its staffing is unconstitutional: the Trump administration should ignore the lower courts until a clarifying ruling comes down from the Supreme Court.

The institution which interprets the US constitution, and has the final say on its meaning is the Supreme Court. It famously okayed the camps in Korematsu so from its issuing the matter was no longer in dispute. But in 2018 Hawaii case, USSC repudiated it.

So the camps were constitutional, as affirned in Korematsu, from their inception until 2018.

Spamming executive orders until the courts block it has been how presidential admins work since Obama lost his supermajority. Biden blatantly ignored the court orders blocking him from student loan forgiveness and eviction freezes and nobody thought it was a constitutional crisis.

Biden in fact attempted to get student loan forgiveness placed wholly outside the ability of the courts to review by arranging so nobody would have standing. The response of the Democrats was to be angry at the Republican's almost-as-tenuous methods of obtaining standing anyway.

Probably the closest we came to a crisis was Biden's extension of the rent moratorium after the Supreme Court's deciding vote (Kavanaugh) said basically "It's unconstitutional but we'll let you wind it down".

Can't the judiciary hold members of the Treasury in contempt for not unfreezing the funds?

They could. But then Trump could instruct the DoJ not to enforce that ruling.

You see, without the rule of law and trust in institutions, all judges are is old people in unfashionable black robes. They're not wizards. If the judiciary is percieved (and acts) in a partisan way, then the other branches of government can hit back. The people shouting about checks and balances are unhappy it's being used on them.

All of this line-pushing is designed to go to the Supreme Court. It's clear from the Trump Administration's intent that they will no longer tolerate the judiciary getting in the way of their agenda with legalese. They don't regard them as a neutral institution enforcing the rule of law, but one colonized by its enemies.

I predict that the Supreme Court will give way to Trump to preserve its own legitimacy, as the court did to FDR to prevent him from stuffing it with his appointees.

I assume you are referring to this order following up on the judge's temporary restraining order freezing (heh) the funding freeze. This is a bit of a strange situation. It's not entirely clear what specific action is being enjoined. They are prevented from... not funding things? Which things? Which specific transactions are required to go through? Which funding decisions are a result of following the president's executive order (forbidden by the court's order), and which funding decisions are simply government officials implementing what they consider to be the proper policy of the government? What even are the proper funding procedures in the absense of executive-directed policy? Are agency heads supposed to pretend that Biden is still president and fund whatever he would want instead?

Huh. Just from reading the TRO - maybe what the Trump administration did was bad (I suspect that SCOTUS will rule that there's at least some areas regarding funding that judges cannot issue this sort of order about due to the separation of powers but arguably you should wait for them to overrule the lower court before assuming that!) but in and of itself my guess is that "the executive branch imperfectly follows a TRO" is not exactly a rare occurrence. I did a quick Google, for instance, and found that the Obama administration, to my untrained eye, appears to have pulled a similar stunt in the national-security context.

As a notable Yale law grad recently explained:

If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.

Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

Maybe the real Constitutional crisis is some random judge deciding that the President's powers as described in Article 2 are actually reserved for that particular judge and they personally shall decide how and if the President may exercise them.

aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.

Well this is correct only by virtue of its tautology - the courts obviously can and do constrain executive power, the very debate is over what are or are not legitimate exercises of that power. The President and his agencies are still subject to the law and the plaintiffs are arguing, among other things, that his OMB violated the Administrative Procedure Act in its stop order.

That is literally what judges do though. They say "this particular military operation, or this particular use of prosecutorial discretion, is illegal". That's their only job in the US legal system. I don't really see how this law grad you speak of can say that a judge isn't allowed to do such things. Judges don't have unlimited power to control the executive, but they do have some power to do so.

It is pretty unprecedented for a district judge to order such a sweeping injunction that affects a core executive duty / power. All the more so when this is certainly a political question (ie Trump isn’t saying he won’t ever spend money Congress appropriated; he is saying first he needs to understand what it is being spent on because what it is being spent on may not be in line with the congressional grant and/or the grant may be impossible.

Also I don’t think judges have ever said “this particular military operation, or this particular use of prosecutorial discretion, is illegal.” Like can you find one case?

United States v. Calley, 1971.

This appears to be a court martial after the fact within the military courts.

I’m asking for a situation consistent with this hypo where a district court placed an injunction on the executive from pursuing a particular battle etc.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer - not a conventional military operation, but the courts explicitly declared the President's actions in exercising his executive authority in wartime illegal.

The steel seizure cases are different. Again SCOTUS decision; was there a TRO?

Also the whole question about the steel seizure cases was whether this was a core power or a secondary power.

The initial order against the federal government began in the district courts.

Also the whole question about the steel seizure cases was whether this was a core power or a secondary power.

So? What was under discussion was whether district courts had 'personally decided how' the President should exercise their powers. In this case they did just that.

I don't have specific examples to hand, but I was speaking from the judiciary's role in the American legal system. Since they are responsible for determining what is and is not in violation of the law, that would then mean that if a particular case comes to court they are therefore deciding if the actions of the executive were ok or not.

Yes but that is comparing like with unlike. These particular rulings are rather unprecedented and responding by saying that rulings in other areas on other matters restrict the executive are common is not responsive.

In the American legal system, judges have traditionally held that certain domains are non-justiciable—outside judical power to review. Military operations and prosecutorial discretion were mentioned here because those are two such traditional domains. So no—the traditional judicial response to suits about a military operation is to say "sorry, my hands are tied, it's categorically outside my judicial authority to be involved" and dismiss the suit.

You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that judges shouldn't categorically exclude themselves from certain domains. There's a reasonable argument for that! But that shift, if it happens, would be a departure from traditional legal norms. And one judge doing so on his own can certainly be criticized as being at odds with the existing limits on judicial power as has been hitherto understood by the judiciary.

I'm not weighing in on the object level question of if the specific question in this particular suit should have been ruled as non-justiciable. It very plausibly is analogous to traditionally non-justiciable domains (like military operations.) But it's hardly cut and dried the way a suit about a military operation would be. There's precedent to be made here by higher courts in the future.

My point here is on the meta-level, that the US legal system recognizes some domains as categorically non-justiciable, and that this is why military operatorations and prosecutorial discretion were invoked as examples.

Fair enough. I was actually unaware of that, so thank you for the correction.

It is what some judges do, very few. The nine on the Supreme Court.

District judges have no authority to issue injunctions against the President, and we know this because the first time it happened in the history of this country was by Judge James Robart in 2017. Do consider the history of this country: FDR hasn't quite passed from living memory, Trump may violate many contemporary norms, the travel ban violated no historic norms and represented no sweeping and dubious exercise of executive authority. Certainly not compared to the sweeping, unprecedented and wholly unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority by who ended up being multiple district judges attempting to actively restrain the authority of the executive. This is why SCOTUS ruled in favor of the XO per curiam.

I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.

I don't know if this is the hill where Trump should invoke Jackson -- probably because I expect SCOTUS will issue another per curiam -- but unless district judges are permanently shaken of the delusion that they have the constitution's endorsement to issue sweeping federal injunctions, let alone those against the executive, that moment is inevitable.

The judges doing this don't really expect that their orders will stand. They're just playing the delaying game; if they can pretend to be just reasonably issuing restraining orders to preserve the case, and avoid the Supreme Court taking it up on the emergency docket, they can keep Trump from doing anything for years, perhaps even his entire term. If Trump invokes Jackson, the higher courts (even those he appointed) will side with their lower-court brethren and we'll have a full-on Constitutional crisis. So he'll try to play the same "I'm not touching you" game the Democrats do, and hope his courts will allow him the same leeway nearly all courts do the Democrats. I'm not sure that'll work, though.

I wonder if there is a way to go to a Republican friendly jdx and get an opposite ruling to effectively force a split.

It has to roll before the fifth circuit.

This is not really sufficient effort for a top level post. It's good that you at least added a link to a story in a response downthread, but that should have been proactively provided (particularly given the overt partisanship of your post) in the first place. You also haven't really explained what each of the parties under discussion actually did, or made any attempt to steelman either side.

Remember,

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light...

So low effort wishcasting is frowned upon generally, but doubly when it is a top level post.

Heard (5000% not trying to be sassy I just think getting modded doesn’t deserve much more than an acknowledgment and a yes sir. I said a while the modding here is not for me so if I’m gonna keep posting here I’m 1937467% not arguing with the mods)

It appears that the judge’s daughter is at a presidential appointed position at Dept of Ed, a department squarely within the crosshairs of DOGE. So not only is the ruling dubious on constitutional grounds, but there is also a concern that his order directly helps his daughter suggesting a conflict of interest.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

I thought the Democratic Party was primarily ideologically motivated, but I'm realizing more and more that it's a patronage network. Their sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything.

You guys are whipped up in a frenzy over mere speculation. Is there any actual evidence to suggest corruption here? Trump constantly engages in brazenly corrupt behavior, but all I hear from the acolytes here are apologetics that strain the limits of credulity.

Trump constantly engages in brazenly corrupt behavior

Can you point to anything Trump has done that matches the Burisma case in severity? The most corrupt actions I've seen from Trump mostly just involve taking vast sums of money from the Adelsons and then advocating for Israel, but he is on the record as supporting Israel anyway already (presumably so he can run another Kosher Vodka scam). Military supply chain corruption, the revolving door between regulatory bodies and the banks they regulate, cozy sinecures for the connected and congressional insider trading all seem far more nakedly and obviously corrupt to me than anything Trump has actually done.

Let me know when you have such a shocking realization about anyone you actually liked.

If you find a conservative-leaning individual that actually believes the Republican Party and broader right wing is low on people who were likable but turned out to act as though "sinecures are more important than ideology, the country, the debt, everything", please point them to me. I can come up with a pretty wide list of once-loved (among soccons) conservative politicians and speakers that turned out quite willing to sell their movement up a creek, sometimes for embarrassingly few pieces of silver light grift.

Which is exactly why I’m so frustrated by this sort of performative shock. It’s an isolated demand for rigor.

I am definitely not accusing you of anything like this; you’re one of the most consistent, evidence-driven users I know.

Sorry, I did not take this as an accusation about me, and did not mean to imply any such accusation. I’m more trying to motion about how both performative and genuine surprise at the malefactors on one’s own side is fairly common, and that distinguishing the two can be tricky even for shock or ‘shock’ at an opponent.

To be fair, the Republicans only got into their new position of Shiva the Destroyer because they were so inept at the power game they lost nearly 100% of the elite.

We're lucky in a way. Normally it takes a war or a depression or other major crisis to clean up government. But we're getting a cleanup on the cheap. It's a miracle really. Normally the corruption would be split equally between the two parties, and would be impossible to get rid of. But since everyone in the elite was so united against Trump, he can go after corruption without any political cost.

Don't worry, I'm sure if Trump gets what he wants, there will be lots of corruption flowing to Republicans as well. In a way, the current situation is a result of the Dems just winning so hard for so long.

I’m sorry for being so snide. Maybe I was wrong to imply that you’re only applying this standard to your political enemies.

I remain frustrated by the number of people who have watched Trump cheerfully trample the commons and loot the (figurative) treasury only to insist that it’s fine, since he hasn’t yet gotten what he wants. He can set up his own sinecures as long as he dismantles a few of the existing ones. He can pardon his own buddies, because that’s just how the game is played. He can siphon money and reveal state secrets and purge his opponents and offend whomever he chooses, and it’s fine, because at least he’s hurting the right people.

But when anyone on the other team is revealed to have engaged in such shocking behavior, oh, the knives come out.

But when anyone on the other team is revealed to have engaged in such shocking behavior, oh, the knives come out.

Do they? I don't recall much handwringing over Biden's pardons, and more of a "of course he did" attitude. Same for "looting the treasury".

On the contrary, they (well, Trump) provided an acceptable deal to Technocapitalists along with a popular coalition when Managerials only offered confiscation.

Destroying enemy strongholds is part of the power game, and something the left has had absolutely no qualms about doing when it was their turn.

I donno about that. There are reports I'm inclined to believe that Trump's SV donors are having their way slashing away at regulators (even justifiable ones) that have been hounding them. I'm taking the reports with a grain of salt, but if they are to be believed and aren't just fear mongering we may see rollbacks of numerous pro-consumer banking regulations. Like how banks and credit cards can't order transactions to maximize fees. But we shall see.

I still think 4 years of SV theoretically looting the commons won't be as bad as the last 4 years of open borders, schools secretly transitioning children, DEI mandates and your quality of life constantly being attacked (no plastic straws, gas ovens, etc) because "muh environment". But maybe they'll surprise me. Maybe they'll invent fresh horrors the likes of which makes me beg we could return to debating only sterilizing and mutilating children.

Yes I agree impeachment should be on the table…for the judge who wrote this absurd TRO. The sole random district court judge is requiring the president to violate his Art II core duty with zero precedent for such a sweeping declaratory TRO. It wouldn’t be unfair to label what the judge is doing as a judicial coup.

If he brazenly defies the courts

laughs in Heller and Bruen

Yeah, it sure does suck when nobody respects court decisions and just does whatever they want in active contempt of those decisions.

Yeah, I've got a small genre of posts just for this sort of stuff, followed by places where the administration swore it wasn't going to do something, waited for the court case to end, and then did it anyway. This was this week, and I didn't even have to go searching for it. There's a million ways to talk about how all of these cases are tots different and there's some line that absolutely wasn't drawn by a Texas Sharpshooter, but the idea that this is terra nova is laughable.

NYTimes article that wasn't paywalled for me, with my browser extensions: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html

In more bad-things-happening-due-to-USAID-stop-work-order-news*, it turns out that USAID participated in clinical trials. ("The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers...") Interrupting clinical trials is bad:

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.

The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.

When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.

Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.

The State Department, which now oversees U.S.A.I.D., replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.gov, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda that is counter to President Trump’s foreign policy.

In interviews, scientists — who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media — described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm.

The Declaration of Helsinki, a decades-old set of ethical principles for medical research that American institutions and others throughout the world have endorsed, lays out ethical guidelines under which medical research should be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.

Ms. Zondi said she was baffled and frightened. She talked with other women who had volunteered for the study. “Some people are afraid because we don’t know exactly what was the reason,” she said. “We don’t really know the real reason of pausing the study.”

The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (known as CAPRISA) and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.

“My first thought when I saw this order was, There are rings in people’s bodies and you cannot leave them,” Dr. Mansoor said. “For me ethics and participants come first. There is a line.”

Setting aside that we now won't get the scientific results of these studies, fucking people over like this** seems like counterproductive foreign policy.

*I'm posting this, because I didn't recall clinical trials coming up in the other discussions (I only learned of it this morning), so it's presumably also news to others and I thought it was different in a key way. (see footnote 2)

**I say "fucking people over," because it's not a situation in which receiving something is better than nothing, even if you didn't receive everything you expected/were promised; these test subjects risked their own health on the basis of guarantees from the trials and the USA reneged on its part of the deal. (I.E., if you're too hard-heartened a libertarian to believe in Kantian medical ethics, the USA is still in the wrong, due to not following the terms of contracts it entered.)

Maybe the pharmaceutical companies that hold the patents and stand to profit hand over fist if these experiments work should chip in a bit.

As experimental treatments, none of these treatments have been shown to be safe and effective. If your doctor gave you one of these treatments, he would be disgraced, disbarred, and possibly improsoned. If any of the trial subjects dropped dead due to the treatment, nobody would bat an eye.

As a matter of ethics these patients were making a sacrifice in the name of science, and it's a shame the science is lost. But it's disingenous to call it lifesaving treatment, because it's not.

So USAid is sponsoring a study that will benefit a foreign drug company and may develop a treatment that at best Americans will have to pay eye watering prices while [that] foreigners get it for free? For a disease that I'd really prefer not a single tax dollar went to treat in the first place. Call me heartless, but I'm strongly in favor of shitting this trial down.

Let's let quarter trillion dollar firms pay for their own medical studies and let's let foreign nations who use monopsony to bid down their fair share of treatment development costs accept that that means fewer treatments get developed.

a study that will benefit a foreign drug company... quarter trillion dollar firms...

Which foreign company is benefiting from this?

Americans will have to pay eye watering prices while foreigners get it for free?

Americans can already get PrEP and it's even covered by Medicare and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of members of this forum who would rather people did not have HIV treatments.

Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure. It makes me think that objections founded on population growth aren't really the crux of the objection.

I misread the participant's name as AstraZenica, my apologies.

Americans can already get PrEP and it's even covered by Medicare and Medicaid, much to the chagrin of members of this forum who would rather people did not have HIV treatments.

I am quite happy with people getting whatever treatments they wish to pay for, but I'd strongly prefer HIV treatments from taxes be limited to children born with it and transfusions.

Not to mention that other members of this forum were railing against USAID because they are "propping up" unsustainable populations of Africans. This trial was for a birth control device which would directly reduce the number of future Africans and yet I don't see those members defending this as a worthwhile expenditure.

Presumably I’m one of the posters you have in mind here. For the record, I do think that researching birth control methods (experimental or otherwise) in Africa is a very worthwhile expenditure.

Now, should that expenditure come from USAID specifically? I’m less sure about that. I can see a good argument for it, which is basically: Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons. Not only would many Africans themselves understandably perceive this as a colonialist affront, but a great many westerners would also be made very uncomfortable by this and would not want their tax dollars employed in such a way. Therefore, laundering this mission through an ostensible charity organization creates the veneer (and, in fairness, also in some sense the reality) of both benevolence on our part and voluntariness on the part of the Africans.

Now, this attitude is directly at odds with the ethos of transparency and legibility which is motivating DOGE’s cuts to things like USAID. They don’t want the government doing things that look like one thing but are actually a totally different thing. They don’t want to continue to countenance the surreptitious laundering of funds for misrepresented ends. This is a respectable motivation, but I do wonder whether it is necessarily at odds with the important work that advanced nations need to be urgently performing in order to find every way imaginable to drive down third world fertility.

Efforts to drive down Sub-Saharan African fertility cannot be conducted openly and for explicitly eugenic/racialist reasons.

They can be and are conducted openly. Yes, they don't openly do this because they think subsaharans are inferior, but that's because they don't and I don't see why that's a bad thing.

Obviously I’m aware of the work the Gates Foundation is doing in this arena, and I applaud it. What I mean is simply that if the Gayes foundation did exactly the same work, but instead of presenting it as a fulfillment of liberal principles of female empowerment they presented it as a work of paternalistic technocratic imposition on a less-developed society for the protection/betterment of a higher civilization, that work would be utterly rejected by both the African populace and the donors. That the Gates Foundation, as far as I’m aware, does sincerely believe in the aforementioned liberal principles is simply the cherry on top.

To be clear, I do absolutely think it’s true that most African women who are currently having six or seven children would prefer to have less than that. (I had a previous post about declining fertility in advanced countries, in which I said that most women simply do not instinctively desire large families, and given the option to have a small number of children, the revealed preference of the average woman is to do so.)

Lowering African fertility is indeed a boon to those women, and to the countries in which they live, which do not have the economic infrastructure to provide gainful and productive employment to their current masses of young people. To the extent that African countries can be made less unstable and less likely to export tens of millions of unemployed and restless young black men to First World countries, the efforts of the Gates Foundation, and of USAID insofar as their efforts have been similar, are a net good for humanity.

However, my hope is that behind the curtain, at the upper echelon of organizations like the Gates Foundation and USAID, there is also a covert understanding of additional eugenic principles and that their work can be targeted, under the guise of charity, to take specific interest in improving the genetic stock of the relevant countries; to not only produce less Africans but also, in the long run, better Africans. Africans who are better equipped to be peer-level participants in the global order as their countries are further integrated into a global political infrastructure.

In patriarchal societies(like most of Africa), women typically desire multiple grown sons. African fertility preferences are genuinely high.

Despite having the highest fertility rate in the world, women and men alike in Niger say they want more children than they actually have – women want an average of nine, while men say they want 11.

—Jill Filipovic, "Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger," Guardian, March 2017

Even in that article, the family planning clinic is funded by USAID, huh.

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For a disease that I'd really prefer not a single tax dollar went to treat in the first place.

Yeah, there's been a growing awareness how badly we've been lied to about HIV.

HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it. In the Western world, it spread in the gay community because of anal sex and extreme promiscuity.

So what happened in South Africa? 1) The common practice of "dry sex" in which women rub abrasives into their vagina 2) Huge rates of child rape.

Those problems might be intractable. Apparently there was a billboard in Eswatini that said "don't rape kids".

HIV doesn't readily spread from heterosexual sex. There is essentially zero risk from vaginal intercourse the way that 99% of Americans will experience it

This is a heck of a non sequitur. Whether you like it or not, a lot of straight men like anal sex - with women. The first Google hit found that in 2013 about a third of heterosexuals in 20 US cities they polled admitted to having had anal sex in the past year. Now, I've never seen the appeal myself, and you're welcome to say it's against nature for all the same reasons as gay sodomy if you want to be all Catholic about it - but it's a thing, massively so. Promiscuous gay men might be a small minority of the American population, but it doesn't follow that the remainder only have wholesome church-approved missionary sex, and you'd have an even harder time trying to change that than trying to walk back gay acceptance.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men. Straight people might try it occasionally (not sure why) but it's not really on the menu like it is for gay men. The average N count for straight people is also tiny compared to gay men.

HIV has never really spread in a western heterosexual population.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.

The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals. Thirty percent of male respondents would have to have lied about being straight (and thirty percent of female respondents would have to have lied about having had it at all) for this to fit the data.

Probably something like 99% of the anal sex is being had by gay men.

The poll I linked specifically polled heterosexuals.

Your link doesn't contradict his claim. It's a question of frequency within each population.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

Last time I ran the numbers (several years ago. It might be time for an update), gay men got HIV at >80x the rate of the rest of the population. This was reported like "20x the general population" or something, which neatly hides the fact that people-who-aren't-gay-men get HIV at less than half the rate of the general population.

I don't think your mechanism of action can dismiss such stark differences.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

I'm not particularly invested in proving that it does, I just specifically wanted to point out what I believed to be a really weird jump in reasoning.

If you think HIV does spread readily from heterosexual sex, then why hasn't it?

Frequency and the amount of partners would be an obvious alternative explanation.

Last time I ran the numbers (several years ago. It might be time for an update), gay men got HIV at >80x the rate of the rest of the population.

That does not indicate that anal sex is more risky in itself, by that factor. I haven't looked into it, it's just something that popped up on twitter, but I see "only" a 10x difference between receptive anal, and receptive vaginal intercourse. The base rate is so low in any case, that I struggle to understand how anything but higher promiscuity could explain the difference between gay and straight people contracting HIV.

I see "only" a 10x difference

That's a shockingly huge difference that could explain the entire disparity and then some.

Masking for COVID is still poorly studied (or at least poorly publicized), but the range I saw was between 1.05x - 6x difference compared to unmasked. I have no problem believing that a 90% effective intervention could stop an epidemic in its tracks.

(As an aside, I'm pretty sure that tweet is comparing the 1.11% risk of HIV per exposure to the 2% risk of pregnancy per year.)

I have no problem believing that a 90% effective intervention could stop an epidemic in its tracks.

We are talking about a 1% transmission rate vs 0.1% transmission rate. You're not getting an epidemic from either, without massive promiscuity.

(As an aside, I'm pretty sure that tweet is comparing the 1.11% risk of HIV per exposure to the 2% risk of pregnancy per year.)

What am I missing?? It says "estimated median risk of HIV transmission per exposure". Where did you get anything about pregnancy?

If you assume weekly sex and other simplifications, then a 1% rate of transmission doubles the infected population every two years. A 0.1% rate doubles it every 20 years. That's moderate promiscuity IMO, particularly since it still mostly works if they change partners annually (as opposed to weekly).

What am I missing?? It says "estimated median risk of HIV transmission per exposure". Where did you get anything about pregnancy?

The first sentence of the tweet (emphasis added):

Even gay sex per se is less risky than people think - comparable to female pregnancy risk with a condom

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then why hasn't it

It has in Africa and it did to an extent at the height of the HIV pandemic in Russia (mostly intravenous drug fueled, but it spilled over into the straight population for a time) in the late 90s and early 2000s. In almost all cases prostitutes form the reservoir population, such that even though the risk of an individual customers getting infected was very low, there are so many customers that it can still spread.

So what happened in South Africa? 1) The common practice of "dry sex" in which women rub abrasives into their vagina 2) Huge rates of child rape.

It’s part of it, but it’s also much more frequent prostitution in these places. In any case, there were heterosexuals did get HIV in the West unless you think they’re all lying, and anal sex is increasingly common among heterosexuals (a joke about it is, for example, the opening scene in the very popular PMC lib comedy ‘Fleabag’), probably more so than it was in the 80s.

Why are we funding birth control and HIV prevention research in South Africa? We already know how they have babies and get aids and we know how they can avoid those things. That they choose to rape virgins instead of taking hiv medicine is irrelevant to the effectiveness of condoms.

Silicone rings in vaginas are commonly self inserted and removed.

NuvaRing is a fairly common birth control drug with this delivery method.

That sounds like another entry into more bad things happening because USAID was doing things they shouldn't have been, in this case conducting medical trials.

Why shouldn't they have been participating in clinical trials? Couldn't the problem have been avoided by the stop-work order having specific previsions for per-protocol discontinuation of trial interventions, as applicable?

It's not what I hoped they were doing, anyway. I'm a bit surprised that experimental contraceptive methods is even something that countries are still accepting from the US. South African TFR: 2.3 -- apparently they are already utilizing birth control adequately. Perhaps they should stop engaging in activities that spread HIV.

I'm not really sure how the executive office works, but my impression is that, somehow, they can't do that, the study in question just finds endless ways to file extensions, are forgotten about, and continue operating as usual until the next administration comes into power. My first guess would be that it's relatively hard to figure out what any specific program is actually doing, until they go complaining to the New York Times about it, since there are so many of them, and they have an incentive to look important but also non controversial.

Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.

We have a massive problem. 2T deficit p.a. We have an NGO network funded by our own government working against us. And indeed, it is almost certain that any of these stories are being coordinated by current USAID employees (in part why it was absurd for the judge to issue a TRO re thr admin leave). That is, we are paying the American executive to try to undermine the American executive.

No sorry I don’t care about this. Sorry it sucks but we can’t afford it and it needs to be cut. This is the way.

I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.

A lot of that is make believe. There are a ton of expiring provisions that will “cost money” to extend but won’t raise or lower current taxes. At the same time, there are some tax relief they want.

I mean, do you not count tariffs as taxes? If you eliminate the 25% tax on the profits of China-to-Amazon Inc, but instead charge them 25% on everything they bring from china, are you cutting taxes? Or just shifting the tax burden?

Yeah, Trump's tariff announcement today was good actually. Certainly much better than his previous ideas.

  1. Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

  2. VAT offsets. If European countries average 20% VAT and we average 6% sales tax, that's the equivalent of a 14% difference in tariffs that need to be accounted for.. Edit: I am wrong. Thanks to @The_Nybbler.

There's a good chance Trump could lower taxes in the US in a revenue neutral way.

i still dont get why people think VAT is comparable to tariffs? is trumps idea of "fair" that we keep taxing our own products with VAT but make an exception american imports?

Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

Except that others don't charge us tariffs, we charge ourselves tariffs. It's more like "we charge ourselves what others charge themselves". When you formulate it that way it becomes clear why this is a losing proposition.

The whole "the consumer pays 100% of the tariff" has ben debunked a million times. The cost is never passed on 100% to the consumer.

I don't see what that has to do with what I wrote.

Can you provide more information on this? I'm curious what proportion is, as I'd assume it'd be fairly close intuitively, and I've never seen anything otherwise.

A quick peruse of google scholar give this paper: https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1814161

It suggests that for a change in tariff rates, less than 1/3 is reflected in end consumer prices.

Sorry I don't have more sources, I haven't read many econimics papers even though I'm an economist 🙃

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If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.

A VAT isn't similar to a tariff at all, and reciprocating Euro VAT with American tariff is harm to Americans with no purpose. The way VAT works is an American hammer costs e.g. $10 in the US and $12 in Europe because of VAT... but a European hammer of the same base price ALSO costs $10 in the US and $12 in Europe. There's no unfair practice there.

If you set the tariffs off against sales tax, you've made a truly horrible incentive; it makes it easier for states to raise their sales taxes up to Euro/Canadian VAT levels.

I've always thought reciprocal carbon taxes on imports would be an amazing scissor-wrench to throw in the works.
Get the free traders arguing with the greens about why you can import silicon made with coal in China at 0% tax, but silicon made with coal in the US gets taxed and regulated to death.

Sloshing tariffs and corporate tax around is well and good, but what about the rest of the tax cuts promised, amounting to a fiscal hole somewhere in the neighborhood of $5T?

Overtime pay tax cut could be anywhere from .25 trillion to 3 trillion? Sounds like they just wanted to throw a few extra trillion in there.

I'm upset he wants to expand salt deductions though. Reducing those last time was a huge coup. Guess tech bending the knee means he needs to give something back.

The analysis seems pretty reasonable to me. It's hard to put an exact number accounting for how people will react to the new rules environment. But it's even harder to imagine this all penciling out.

First time I’ve ever heard of tax cuts being insulting

It's not necessarily just nibbling around the edges. There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

DOGE started with USAID because the spending was so ludicrous and so obviously geared towards sinecures for the uniparty political machine.

It's been what, 3 weeks. They've cut $100 billion so far. Give it time. If they're allowed to cook, it's going to be a lot, lot more.

Even if they do find $1 trillion in fraud, he’s proposed five trillion in tax cuts. That math is harsh.

Total government revenue is less than 5 trillion. You are comparing annual vs total numbers.

There are some indications that the amount of fraud in the larger programs such as SSI, Medicare/caid, and defense might be significant. If so, the savings could easily amount to $1 trillion per year. I guess we'll see.

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

They've cut $100 billion so far.

Have they cut or have they just put a temporary stop on expenditures? How many programs have actually been durably cancelled, either by the executive or by Congress?

SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense amount to amount to $3.5T. do you really believe that "easily" 30% of that is waste?

The US is definitely getting as least bang for their buck with military contracts. Any reason to believe that the other are different?

The military presumably wastes money on slow rolling procurement and other things of that nature. A full quarter of defense spending is salaries, and perhaps there are people drawing a salary that don't need to be there.

SS is a cash transfer program that spends less than one percent on administrative overhead, so savings from firing useless employees would be minimal. The only possible avenue for waste would be actual fraud on the part of the recipients. I doubt that this is anywhere near 30%, but I don't expect either of us could convince the other on this point. However, the longer DOGE goes on without announcing finding this fraud, the more skeptical we should be.

A full quarter of defense spending is salaries

I would go the other way. Salaries should be a bigger fraction of the military budget.

There could be massive savings also in Medicare and Medicaid if they only stomp their feet and use their massive scale to cut costs.

They've cut $100 billion so far.

doge-tracker.com/ gives 45.6 billion, of which 37.5 billion comes from counting the full annual salary and benefits of the staff accepting the voluntary retirement scheme as a saving, even though they are still being paid for another 8 months. Given the number of staff involved compared to normal Federal employee turnover, the real saving here may be negative. And of course, this saving goes away if the government can't eliminate the work the retired employees were doing.

That leaves about $8 billion in unambiguously real savings, of which $4 billion is the illegal cut to the overhead on NIH grants.

I think the difference between the $100 billion being bandied about and the doge-tracker numbers comes from assuming that the entire USAID budget is zeroed out, and that this counts as a DOGE saving.

Here's the doom loop chart

For those of you too lazy to click on the link; the CBO has crunched the numbers and the net effect on income due to transfers (i.e. medicare, medicaid, SS, etc.) beings to be a net negative starting at the middle quintile.

Phrased differently: the top 60% of Americans have less income, on net, because of the massive transfers to the bottom 40%.

Culture war angle: Which quintiles are the sources of new business formation, full time employment, responsible family practices etc?

60+ years of Great Society-ism and horrific perverse incentives for family formation and work mean that we now have a situation where 40% of the population can be - indelicately - called a drag on growth and prosperity. 40%.

Even Sarah McLaughlin can't save this DOGE, and this DOGE can't save America.

What is surprising about that chart? What did you expect? Obviously the transfers benefitting the poor come from the rich. People have been voting for this for the last century, and will keep voting for it. The state's share of the economy will keep growing, first to european levels, then beyond. And it doesn't matter to people how rich in absolute terms "the poor" are, or how much wealth gets destroyed in the process. I find the impulse difficult to understand, perhaps an extreme rawlsian risk aversion (like an insurance against relative poverty) coupled with the egalitarian ideal of equal social status leading to a demand of equal income.

Did you intend to offer a serious reply, or just use my comment as a way to jerk the spotlight towards yourself?

The former. Of course there's always a status element in the background, but in the spirit of collaborative discussion, it should be ignored. Pretend I'm not a person, just a collection of positions, and I will do the same for you.

OP isn't talking about whether these things needed to continue to be funded indefinitely. The problem is that instead of "we will fund no further studies, no argument" the order literally caused studies to be halted midway through. Which would be fine if the study was a passive observation of the mating habits of roofing bats in the wild; less fine when it means the volunteers have already begun potentially dangerous treatment regimens, and are now being dumped out into the world. (It's not even as though they can continue taking experimental drugs on their own dime to avoid withdrawal; if the study's over the study's over.)

Lots of people answer this kind of talk with "it was a clean break, or the tiniest amount of leeway being used by everyone and their dog until the whole DOGE died by a thousand paper cuts". But come the fuck on. Leaving clinical-study volunteers hanging is ridiculously evil in principle, and I just can't accept that it was this or setting such a precedent for leniency as to scuttle the entire DOGE endeavor. Really now. The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

The argument against that is that if I have funding and I think I won’t next week, if I get a reprieve by “putting medical devices in bodies”, then I might just do that. Or maybe a drug that needs to be strictly monitored, again, if I will lose everything if I don’t and I get to maintain funding and my job if I just start the trials and hope that the funding doesn’t dry up, why not?

And this would actually be worse for those patients who are being asked to start said trials knowing that the funds might not be there to finish. I’ll be honest, any doctor at the moment trying to recruit people for a NIH trial on a serious disease like cancer knowing that the funding won’t be there should have his license yanked. We know these trials will be stopped, and we know that those recruits will waste time and possibly risk health doing a trial that will stop. And those patients lose time for treatment.

That’s where ripping off the bandage helps. We know the trials are stopping mid trial so people signing up now should know better.

We're talking about months-long trials that were already ongoing when everything was suddenly put on hold with no forewarning. Obviously no one should be starting any more trials for the time being; and doubly-obviously, any doctors trying to blackmail the government by suddenly adding dangerous procedures to an ongoing trial should be sued with extreme prejudice. (They shouldn't be hard to catch, the whole deal with clinical studies that get government funds is that you register what you said you were going to use the money for in advance.)

Because you aren’t working with people who want to cut. So every carve out you give will be expanded beyond belief. Half measures rarely work against an entrenched enemy.

We have very rich liberals in Washington. And wiring money takes less than 24 hours. If people cared as much as they whine about it - someone would have picked up the slack already.

Coordination is hard. I think it's unsurprising for liberals' position to be "we have a coordination machine, it's called the government, please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason". (Even if there are obvious rejoinders.)

please give it back instead of making us build a second one for no reason

The conservative then proceeds to holds up a mirror. "Just build your own foreign aid organization."

I'm honestly surprised they don't. It would be such an obvious PR win, even if they don't actually care about the affected people.

If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.

The genius entrepreneur's elite crack team can't come up with a clearly-worded directive that accounts for "don't dump medical volunteers in the street with experimental equipment inside their bodies" without giving gender activists an out? Really?

No, it's literally impossible. Remember, you're dealing with people with sufficient motivated reasoning to pretend to be confused about words like "man" and "woman". People with years of critical theory training that teaches that meaning is subjective, and concepts constructed.

The place where Elon's people draw the line doesn't have to be accepted by the woke activists, though. DOGE can just come up with a common-sense criterion that makes sense to them, and if someone tries to argue in obvious bad faith that their bullshit study is on the right side of the line, they can just say "no it isn't; you may not appeal this decision; goodbye, please don't email us again". This would undoubtedly still cause a ruckus, and it might even have a few false positives, but it would still be immeasurably better than not having common-sense exceptions at all, and I genuinely think it should be trivial for DOGE to implement if they really have the stuff.

Like, why are you acting as though trivial word-salad smoke-and-mirrors would leave them helpless and befuddled? Isn't cutting through the obfuscation and identifying the good government programs from the woke hustlers supposed to be what they're for? If they're not up to this then one wonders why an elite crack team led by one of the most successful men in the world is needed for this job. You could get the same effect if you told an AI to cut all government programs no matter what, gave it access to a government email, and let it loose.

The DOGE (and Trump more broadly) is fighting a bureaucracy hostile to them. The activists are the people carrying out the orders.

Doing it before-the-fact rather than after-the-fact enables what is essentially a DDOS attack on the decision-makers. Doing it in this order makes a flood-the-zone-with-appeals strategy work in favor of DOGE instead of against it.

@OilFieldRando posted about the first person to die because of Trump's funding cuts.

A poor woman in Thailand died because her hospital couldn't afford the oxygen to keep her alive.

Except that the NGO whose funding was cut off has $630 million in assets, a stock portfolio of $98 million, and it's CEO (a former member of British parliament) makes $1.2 million a year. They have $1.3 billion a year in revenue, and spend some of that helping people illegally immigrate to the United States.

Might this incredibly wealthy organization spare just few hundred dollars to keep a poor woman alive?

I'm sure there's more to the story, but it begs the question. How much baby? How much bathwater? It's not imperative on the U.S. to fund these bloated, corrupt, and biased NGOs just because they might occasionally do some good things.

its not just the funding but also stop-work orders

CAPRISA appears to be an NIH partnership, FWIW. I'm open to the possibilities she was incorrect or lying, but it seems Dr. Monsoor believed the stop-work order applied to discontinuing interventions per-protocol. (Even if she, herself wasn't employed by USAID, it wouldn't be surprising if it was practically impossible to do so without using any USAID resource.)

It's just like when there are cuts to school budgets: the affected orgs, who oppose the cuts, make sure that the effects of the cuts create maximum sympathy as a PR campaign against the cuts. Meanwhile, none of the org administrators suffer a salary cut.

Does this emotional blackmail work? It just makes me harden my heart. I feel like from a game theory standpoint, one must never submit to these kind of tactics, otherwise the other person just gets whatever they want.

Earlier, I expressed disappointment about cutting these programs root and branch, preferring instead a more surgical method.

Now I realize I was wrong. USAID must be pulled up by its roots and rebuilt with people who care about their mission more than their paycheck. Imagine how much good could be done without all the grifters and ideologues in the way.

The conservative in me wants slow, methodical cuts that do the least damage to the good parts. But I also understand that those cuts are easier to block/mitigate, and maybe the best thing is to destroy and rebuild the good parts. People will suffer in the process, but that's true of all change.

Does this emotional blackmail work?

Yes. It works on most of the normies most of the time.

Anyone know of Trumpian "reform" of the BATFE, thus far? Doing an internet search for "Trump BATFE" with a one month time limit doesn't turn up anything. Anyone else wondering why the BATFE should/would be spared? It seems to me that the BATFE should be near the top of the list of federal agencies the base wants "reformed." Some ideas for possible reasons:

The base doesn't actually care about BATFE fuckery, unlike libertarians and policy wonks. (Anyone know if this is true?)

Donald "Take the guns first, and do due process later"/bump stock ban Trump is (mostly) secretly pro-gun control (for little people, of course; not VIPs. Perhaps supported by his general lack of comment on the issue, this election

Some strategist decided that, unlike the FBI, the BATFE would be perceived as "legitimate law enforcement" and, thusly, is off-limits.

Doing an internet search for "Trump BATFE" with a one-month time limit doesn't turn up anything.

Try "Trump ATF".

There has been some, though it's both indirect and likely to be low-impact outside of the courts.

Some amount of it's probably just that Trump isn't very pro-gun, and doesn't really want to spend the political capital on it. Same reason that he's not drawing a lot of lines in the sand for abortion law. Some amount is probably procedural -- as much as the lawfare is being rough for DOGE, most of what DOGE's going after doesn't have the nice clear-line text, while a lot of the ATF funding does, or it has civil service protections in a way that's harder to argue violates separation of powers -- similar to how Brigadia v. Buttigeg wasn't going to get settled before (and likely not after) it got renamed. Some of it's that the malefactors don't have names, where even someone that obsesses over trying to identify specific bad actors or bad behaviors just gets organization or sections or groups that would need a forensic accountant and a lot of luck to actually figure out who called the code red made decisions.

Some of it's just the scope of the problem, in the same way that Trump isn't throwing the FBI out despite the arguments in favor. It's one thing to bite the bullet on throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's another to actually take that process on, at this scale.

Thanks. I saw the executive order, but I interpreted it as lip-service-until-proven-otherwise - the faithful implementation of the stated goal would be to eliminate all BATFE rules about regulated firearm components and disallow Federal prosecutors from pursuing charges for anything but the clearest violations of statutory language, which doesn't require 30 days of review.

I miss your effort-posts on law stuff, btw.

Some amount of it's probably just that Trump isn't very pro-gun, and doesn't really want to spend the political capital on it.

There's different things here. I think he's reasonably pro-gun, he just thinks he's fulfilled his obligation to the NRA and friends by getting Bruen done for them (and likewise for the pro-lifers and Dobbs).

Trump is a lot of things, but he's not the kind of person to consider an obligation like that as open-ended.

Trump did hand out stuff to pro-lifers. It was mostly minor stuff like pardoning FACE act violations, but he did.

Reuters (with links to documents): Trump’s foreign aid freeze stops anti-fentanyl work in Mexico

All of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL) programs in Mexico are currently halted due to the funding freeze, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters. These programs focus heavily on dismantling the fentanyl supply chain, according to State Department budget documents reviewed by Reuters. Their activities include training Mexican authorities to find and destroy clandestine fentanyl labs and to stop precursor chemicals needed to manufacture the illicit drug from entering Mexico.

In Mexico, INL also donates drug-detecting canines that helped Mexican authorities seize millions of fentanyl pills in 2023 alone, according to a March 2024 INL report.

“By pausing this assistance, the United States undercuts its own ability to manage a crisis affecting millions of Americans," said Dafna H. Rand, former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance at the State Department from 2021 to 2023. “U.S. foreign assistance programs in Mexico are countering the fentanyl supply chain by training local security services and ensuring maximum U.S.-Mexican cooperation in the fight against this deadly drug.”

...

Through INL projects, the U.S. partners with Mexican authorities operating on the counternarcotics frontline, including the military, prosecutors and police. Beyond narcotics, INL in Mexico also provides support to combat illegal migration and human smuggling.

Hundreds of projects covering billions of dollars in assistance around the world came to a halt, including much of INL’s work globally, after Trump on January 20 ordered a freeze on most U.S. foreign aid, saying he wanted to ensure the spending was aligned with his "America First" policy.

While U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued waivers for what he called “life-saving humanitarian assistance” to be exempt from the freeze, aid workers and U.N. staff have said most of the programs remain shut and that confusion persists as to what is or isn’t permissible.

One source familiar with the situation said the administration was considering a waiver to permit funding for some foreign anti-narcotics programs, but it wasn't clear if INL’s Mexico projects were among them. Two of the sources said INL’s Mexico projects have not at present been given exemptions.

The funding freeze really seems to have generated many foreseeable problems. This one seems to go pretty directly against the administration's stated policy goals, and I'm having trouble coming up with good defenses of it:

It should have been done by the DEA, not the State Department? Setting aside whether or not this would have been organizationally superior, the way to correct the error of having this be done by the State Department would be to transfer the INL to the DEA... which is apparently not being done.

The administration couldn't have expected this to be done by the State Department, not the DEA, setting aside which is organizationally superior? This would be tacitly conceding their incompetence, and they haven't fixed the problem, despite now being aware of it.

We shouldn't be devote resources to combating drug trafficking on the other side of the border, on principle? Mexico could just as easily say that international drug trafficking is a problem of the recipient country's making, since the recipient country is the one with illicit demand, so Mexico has the principled reason to not devote resources to it.

Anyone have better ideas?

While they talk a big game about fentanyl, realistically there’s nothing that can be done to stop the supply getting in. I think the fentanyl fighting rhetoric is just an excuse to enforce tighter border security.

I think the fentanyl fighting rhetoric is just an excuse to enforce tighter border security.

Are training counterparts on the other side of the border and donating drug-detecting dogs not means to the end of "enforce tighter border security?"

I've heard that fentanyl is strong enough that there if even a single truckload gets through the border, that's already enough doses to saturate the market. This was from a podcast, probably Freakonomics, but I'd have to double-check.

Yeah, fentanyl is tiny. A "lethal" amount is 2 mg, so a single pound could theoretically depopulate a small city. I don't know the exact usage rates but it can't be that fast.

Your comment reads like someone who would also object to a slow and orderly offramp for these same programs.

Is that true? As of last year, were these activities in need of more funding, in your opinion? Or was it the exact right amount of money the Mexicans were getting to learn how to kick down doors in slums? Or did you think they only needed about half?

I'm agnostic about the optimal funding for this program. I find it noteworthy, due to it being in support of a stated priority.

These posts are tiresome. Are you going to continue to post each one you can find? It is clear the strategy implemented. It has some pluses and has some minuses. Everyone understands the blunt force approach would be over inclusive but harder to game and faster to implement.

We get it that you don’t like it, but simply posting “here is another thing I don’t like about the freeze” from sources ideologically against the freeze would be akin to me posting “here is another waste of your tax dollars” from the DOGE.

The outcome of the freeze will be measured in the coming years; not days. But will you come back and check to see if there was any more fentanyl in the US in the next year to see if your “chicken little” story comes to fruition? Or are you just finding stories to try to discourage the blunt force approach?

Are you going to continue to post each one you can find?

If there are more which I think are interesting and CW-y. Also note that the top level comment below this is me pointing out the conspicuous lack of intervention at the BATFE, despite that being an agency that commits a whole lot of fuckery that could legitimately be stopped by executive order.

The funding freeze it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”.

It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it. Yeah, we need diversity because it makes teams more effective, diversity means different backgrounds and experiences, and look at this n=25 study from 2008!

In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded. Or just, like, used any other method of investigating what the government's spending money on, such as Google or the large amount of public data. These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web! Actually shutting it all down immediately doesn't accomplish much, other than making a lot of people mad or enthused on twitter.

When has this slow and gradual reform worked in history, especially for something hard like shrinking government or anti-corruption efforts.

I don't understand what you mean. 90 days is not 'slow and gradual'. Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades. Trump's in power for four years.

Also, under the current strategy all of Elon's big cuts have been blocked by judges, because they go directly against the Impoundment Control Act (passed the senate 80-0 in 1974 and affirmed by SCOTUS at the time), among other things. Courts are slow, 90 days is a reasonable timeframe. So the current strategy isn't actually working better.

Slow and gradual reform by the standards of history is decades.

I'm not so sure. Justinian reforms took less than 10 years from start to finish. They were so successful that they're still in use today.

Unless you count "slow and gradual reform" as "the entire government collapsed and reformed, but the country's name didn't change"- and seeing as how most countries (or rather, the government that claims those same borders and the same name) have only existed for 30-70 years I think "no reform, then massive radical reform" matches history a little better.

This is just incorrect. They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.” No there is a broad grant for the president and his delegate to use broad discretion.

Thus the president pausing payments isn’t impounding the money; it is the president figuring out what he wants to do with the broad grant given to him.

The Impoundment Act doesn’t come up until after a long while the president eschews spending anything. Of course with a Republican congress hopefully he can get a simple vote and the money is returned.

Now you might say “then why is he blocked.” The answer is forum shopped handpicked judicial activists have issued TROs where they don’t really need to justify their arguments and they don’t really expect to win on appeal but the hope is that delay favors the bureaucrats which it does.

I think this ultra vires judicial activism should be grounds for impeachment.

They do not get directly against the Impoundment Control Act. Take USAID. The appropriation by Congress doesn’t say “spend X dollars on items A through AAA every week.”

This would be more convincing if Elon hadn't attempted to pull almost all USAID workers off of their jobs, sending many of them back to the United States? Which is one of the things a judge blocked. Also if Elon and Trump weren't publicly clear about their desire to dismantle USAID. Judges observe the words you say online.

I agree that if Elon and Trump were smarter, they could've been creative, and tried to massively change the missions of agencies like USAID while still appearing to fulfill the requirements of legislation. He isn't doing that though.

No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.

And firing the people who you think are doing crazy shit doesn’t mean you intend to not do anything with the cash. Hell Rubio was instructed to think through things.

Maybe the problem is the judges were listening to the wrong media.

No putting people on admin leave is crucial. It is what happens when you think a business is doing crazy shit because you don’t want those people to continue to do crazy shit.

I do not understand what you are saying here. How is putting them on leave now, vs in 60 days, "crucial"? They have been doing that "crazy shit" for decades.

(And, again, judges have blocked all his big moves here, as was entirely predictable, so he hasn't even actually stopped them.)

You're doing the thing I mentioned in the above comment where you come up with post-hoc justifications for things Trump/Musk have done that are smarter than what they're actually doing.

From Musk on twitter: "We spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper." "USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.". Trump on TruthSocial: "USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY ... CLOSE IT DOWN!"

If you say that, and then fire all the employees, I can reasonably conclude they're not planning to spend the money on different kinds of foreign aid. If they were planning to do that, they could just Tweet/Truth it. Instead of that. They aren't.

I agree that Musk and Trump could be effectively accomplishing their goals and improving the government on net if they did different things than they are currently doing.

I also still consider it entirely possible Musk, who is very smart and capable, will realize the current approach isn't accomplishing as much as he thinks and do something else. But he hasn't done that yet.

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When private sector orgs want to do a zero-based reboot, they give everyone 1-3 months' notice and tell them to reapply for their own jobs while working out their notice. (And even that is a desperation move that you wouldn't do in an underperforming company that wasn't in imminent danger of failure) They don't fire everyone and invite them to reapply for their own jobs from the outside. Private sector orgs who did do that would find that everyone competent applied for a job at a competitor instead.

Private sector orgs who did do that would find that everyone competent applied for a job at a competitor instead.

Isn't this the key, though? The public sector is the public sector, it doesn't experience competition in the same way. If you were going to lose your US Government job, where the fuck would you go? Who competes with the US Government from a talent-recruiting perspective? State governments? Other countries' governments? Neither of these are run like privately-owned corporations, and some of them have way more friction for joining.

These programs weren't secret, all the info was on the web!

Assuming you trust what's on the web, which maybe you shouldn't given that USAID has channeled funds ostensibly meant for Pakistan into "making Cuban Twitter" as part of a scheme to somehow undermine the Cuban government.

One potential benefit of these sorts of purges is that it helps consolidate US spending into something that's more legible to the executive branch (and Congress). Now, given that the executive branch has a history of lying, not only to Congress but also to the Executive himself I think it's good that the entire system is flushed from time to time and programs restarted from scratch to ensure that there can be proper oversight and accountability. I mean, think about it - if we just wanted Good Government Programs to run with minimal confusion, we'd get rid of democracy and elections and call it a day.

However, frankly, it is hypothetically possible that every single program is doing something Good And Useful. It does not then follow that no programs should be cut. If the national debt is actually going to be a problem (and probably it is) we should not spend beyond our means. Just as in our personal lives, that means that there will be some good things that we can't have. I won't be particularly sad about INL (which is a shady bunch in my book) being temporarily shut down in Mexico. Possibly the US government would want to shut it down any way as they might be approaching the problem of drug flow from Mexico a little differently, I'm not sure.

One thing I haven’t heard brought up in all this shutdown talk is I that I think I remember Janet Yellen talking about needing to enact extraordinary methods about two weeks ago to stall a federal shutdown due to the debt ceiling. https://apnews.com/article/treasury-debt-limit-janet-yellen-7e598f2811d75ad5159f9338f7cdce16

So okay yeah Jan 27th. Hypothesis here, trump anticipates the dems using this as a way to hit him in the face with a metaphorical shovel, something along the lines of “republicans won’t agree to any reasonable deal and they’re the reason and this is bad” so preemptively chooses to do effectively a shutdown but on his own terms. Now the conversation isn’t republicans hit debt ceiling and can’t broker a deal but republicans have shut down these wasteful programs. Arguably the best management of the narrative I’ve seen from them in the last 20 years.

None of this is a comment on whether this or that program being shutdown is good or bad, simply that from that narrative, it’s arguably going great, and so far we haven’t hit the debt ceiling. Maybe I’ll eat my words in a few days but still so far I haven’t been hearing much about the debt ceiling being a problem since he started cutting these programs.

Government shutdowns are politically problematic because they cause government services voters care about to pause. Having this kind of narrative doesn't really help with that. The median voter's not super smart, and not super plugged into politics, but one consequence of that is they won't fall for this like 'this is good because covid' when prices o up, or conversely 'this is good because we're cutting woke government waste' when services start freezing.

In this case, Trump could have just said 'this funding freeze will go into effect in 90 days', and the agencies and departments would've all started begging for their money pretty quickly, without actually being defunded

And what would that accomplish? You think USAID would say "Ok, you got us! We won't sponsored subversive operations in Eastern Europe anymore, and will focus on vaccines for Africans"? I think they'd use the 90 days to set up more NGO's that fund NGO's, to pretend that they never sponsored subversion to begin with.

I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.

And what would that accomplish?

... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?

I also think the only reason people are protesting his actions is that they know this is the only thing that would work.

It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act). If I thought govt spending was about to permanently decrease by more than 20%, I'd be saying very different things (even though I also don't like the focus on cutting spending vs making govt better, more effective)

It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts. Because they aren't legal by established law and precedent (Impoundment Control Act).

NGOs have run to DC and SDNY to get blocks because those are the most politically corrupt districts. The problem for them is that the TROs are so unprecedented and off the rails that higher courts are going to need to step in quickly.

i don't know how blocking these cuts using the judiciary will work in the long term. unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs. For example lets say judge decides you can't cut USAID funding overall then Trump just funnels funding away from basket weavers in Afghanistan to pro-life groups in China. Basically just do turnabout and then when people complain Trump is being a hypocrite by carrying out the same corruption he criticised others of doing he can claim he tried to cut the funding cleanly but the judiciary tried to stop him.

unless this funding has very explicit earmarks from congress then the administration should be able to just redirect it to fund Trump allied NGOs

Yes, I suggested doing things like this earlier. It might work. (It'd be harder for the programs other than USAID they're trying to cut, USAID is very small compared to rest of the federal government). My big criticism here is that, whatever Trump and Elon are currently doing, they're not optimizing for it working, they're trying to make it big and splashy.

... From the OP: "forcing programs to come forward and say, “look, we’re actually something you want to keep because X, please give us some money”, without also shutting down the anti-fentanyl work in mexico. obviously?

And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?

It is not working yet! Judges have blocked almost all of his big cuts

So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut. When the Supreme Court ruling comes around, they'll know exactly where to take the hatchet to.

And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing, and nobody knowing there's anything that should be cut. Again, what good is letting them do that? Or put another way: how does that plausibly lead to cutting away the waste?

Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.

If it's so simple, howcome literally no sense be died that until now?

Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent,

This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.

If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?

In the alternative...

and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied.

If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?

Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?

There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.

This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.

They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.

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No, it implies that they were explaining to themselves or a very friendly review board why this spending was needed. The relationship between the groups handing out the funds and the people using them isn’t like a normal business relationship. The funding group has no reason to care whether or not the program actually works. They are obligated to spend $XK on grants in a certain period, and they actually get punished for not spending the money. So if you follow tge procedure and say tge right sorts of things about your project, you get money — no matter how bad your previous track record is, no matter how obvious it is that the program you’re proposing wouldn’t work, no matter how obviously you are going to go over budget.

The only answer is to shut it down and have a complete outsider look over these grants. If they can’t explain why Iraqi Sesame Street will improve the security of the Middle East, then is needs to go.

And literally every single program will say that, resulting in nothing changing

... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen. It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.

So? It already exposed who needs constant o be cut

I don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?

... what? Some programs will say "we are destroying fentanyl labs in Mexico", and not get frozen. Others won't say that, because they're funding womens' organizations in myanmar, and will get frozen

Except "women's organizations in Myanmar" will be under an "if you cut this, billions will die" item, and it will look like there's really nothing to cut.

It's the exact same thing that's happening now, except the fentanyl one doesn't get frozen.

Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?

don't think your logic here makes sense? How does the instant freeze help Musk distinguish between programs that do and don't deserve to be cut, vs just collecting the information without doing the freeze?

How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen. It was only then that we discovered that all the "independent" media in Ukraine were funded by them. You know this. How do you propose anyone finds out where all this money ends up without the freeze?

I do not think you're thinking clearly about this. Elon does not get different information if he cuts everything now, vs sending out an order to cut everything in 60 days. In both cases, he has to make factual determinations about how important the womens' organizations in Myanmar are.

Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?

I don't understand how immediately freezing funding makes it easier to collect this data, I think that's something that was imagined after the fact to justify the freezes. (And, again, most of the freezes have themselves been blocked, so...)

How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen

I do not think this is true? DOGE staff were inside the USAID building and had access to their computer systems. Freezing USAID doesn't affect their ability to do that.

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Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.

Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work. Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed. The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.

(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)

EDIT:

It feels like a lot of people here are doing the same thing progressives do when asked to defend affirmative action - they just come up with reasons why it might be a good thing, don't think about if it makes sense in context, and then argue it.

I’ll cop to this in individual cases.

Trump would have failed just as every cost-cutting politician I ever voted for failed.

When Congress wants to cut discretionary spending, discretionary spending gets cut. (Obama-era sequestration was the most recent example). Even Moldbug agrees that the bureaucracy is effectively accountable to Congress*, should Congress care to exercise its power. And in the specific context of non-defense discretionary spending, Congress routinely do care to exercise that power. Discretionary spending isn't bankrupting America, entitlements are. See for example the charts in [this report] showing overall discretionary spending growing slower than the economy over decades, and barely keeping pace with inflation in the decade leading up the the pandemic.

The reason why cost-cutting politicians fail is that entitlements (and old-age entitlements in particular) grow faster than they can cut discretionary spending. You don't need shock-and-awe to cut discretionary spending, which is all Musk is doing so far. If Musk makes a serious dent in Medicare fraud (which he hasn't even started trying to yet, and won't be able to do by grepping lists of payees for woke keywords) he will save far more money than he could

Incidentally, in countries that haven't become pensioner-gerontocracies, you can really cut spending (including the equivalent of entitlement spending) the normal way. Canada and Sweden both cut spending by 7% of GDP in the 1990's, in both cases all that was needed was an electorate which cared about deficit reduction (which the US electorate claims to). The problem in the modern day (not just in the US) is that there are a lot of pensioners, and they vote. And the experience of the UK from 2010 through Brexit is that if you try to cut everything else faster than the welfare-state-for-the-old grows due to population aging, things start falling apart.

* In the sense that Congress can control budget, and has the ability to punish individual Deep Staters who defy it in a way the President does not because being criticised by name in a Congressional committee report is career-ending for a senior career civil servant.

Making a lot of people enthused is important in politics. You have to ride the wave and short-circuit resistance. Blitzkrieg is a strategy for a reason.

The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.

Giving fundees 90 days to saturate the media and hide all the bad spending wouldn’t work

What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.

The Cathedral likes long drawn-out detail-oriented battles, and the first rule of warfare is not to give the enemy what they want.

IMO, the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war. That isn't currently happening. (USAID funding is not even a percent of the reason the liberal media exists). "Not giving the enemy what they want" is, in this context, the first rule of being mad at your enemy on twitter.

(Yes, this is conflict mindset not mistake mindset. With mistake mindset it looks stupid and damaging to do it this way, naturally.)

This isn't about conflict vs mistake! I'm not entirely against all the libs spontaneously combusting. It's about, like, winning the conflict, which is harder than making a lot of awesome posts.

The resistance doesn't feel particularly short-circuited to me. Judges have blocked most of DOGE's biggest cuts.

I'm willing to hear arguments otherwise, but from where I'm standing this is good.* To the extent that the blocks have an effect at all, it forces more and more of the apparatus and legal precedence that needs to be cut down and replaced onto the side of wasteful spending. If my experience of Brexit is any guide, people aren't going to say, "well, judges blocked it, it must be bad," they're going to say, "why is a judge able to block my elected president, let's get rid of this".

*Obviously, it would be best if the cuts had been carried out quickly without being blocked, but that was never on the table.

What does 'hide all the bad spending mean'? How would they even do that? All of the data on their spending is, and was already, public.

Given the complexity of spending on any serious scale, it is totally impossible to request information in a way that is: (1) readable on any practical time scale, (2) comprehensive enough to allow detailed audit. So you have to rely on people to provide honest summaries of what they've been doing, and nobody ever does when their career and budget are on the line. Impounding the money first switches the focus to "prove we need you, stat" rather than "find a good excuse for the stuff you've done so we don't cut you". EDIT: that is, it gets status quo bias on your side, forcing recipients of grant money to work harder to earn your approval rather than merely avoid drawing your attention.

the first rule of warfare is to destroy your enemy, or at least their capacity to wage war.

That is the goal of warfare. Obviously destroying your enemy's capacity is important but to do that you have to attack in ways they find difficult to counter. That means NOT allowing them to find reasons to stall you, and it means backing them into positions that are difficult to defend. In this case, that it is not legally possible for an incoming president to halt using taxpayer money to fund trans operas in Colombia. And cutting the left-wing patronage network off at the knees is destroying a big part of their capacity, even if you don't save that much money.

Yes Minister is a classic in the art of bureaucratic stalling, and in the hiding of incompetence and corruption, written using real (secret) interviews with top-level politicians. Basically it boils down to the fact that the bureaucracy only has to stall you for a relatively short time before you're snowed under with crises and no longer able to be proactive. That's why speed and optics matters more than efficiency right now - you want to be on the front foot for the hard part of the campaign. Most effective politicians seem to work in this way: Teddy Roosevelt, Tony Blair. You have to get public support and a feeling of momentum, and then you will have the leverage to force your way through.

Stalling Technique

The Five Standard Excuses

Of course, all of this could still fail. But it's looking good right now, and it's looking far better than everyone who's tried to achieve spending reductions.

If my experience of Brexit is any guide,

If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.

To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.

It seems relevant that the tories won in a landslide after brexit and only lost after several elections and mismanaged leadership changes.

The 2019 election was before Brexit. The reason why the Tories won in a landslide was because Parliament was seen as holding up Brexit, and the central campaign pledge was to "Get Brexit Done".

I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway. It was absolutely 100% avoidable. An own goal the likes of which politics has rarely seen. The only thing I regret about Brexit is believing them when they said, "we would like to do what you want, but the EU won't let us". That's clearly not a problem here because Trump is just going ahead and doing what he said he was going to do.

To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.

Yes. That's an inherent difficulty when you are actually trying to defund a vast left-wing conspiracy. Ideally it wouldn't have come to that, but it has.

I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway.

That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.

* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.

More comments

It’s also why the absurd TROs are so undermining—delay plays to the bureaucracy’s advantage

I really don't know if what Trump and Musk are doing is good or right, and I'm far from Trump's ardent defender and fan, but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing. They're using the big tech playbook, which is what Musk is used to. Slash budgets, break stuff, and the stuff that's really needed will become apparent as a result. It's what people who want to actually make change and make their companies better will do, not what people who want to preserve the status quo at any cost. (Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really).

Maybe it's completely the wrong tactic to take. Maybe that playbook should never be employed for government because the programs are too important to have even a temporary gap. I don't know what the right answer is. But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.

Read: it's what actual businesses do, not governments, because businesses care about cutting out waste, and governments don't really

I've said this before, but I have to reiterate: applying the logic of business to government is a mistake. The difference is not that governments don't care about waste and private businesses do; there's significant political incentive to crack down on (perceived) waste. Rather, governments and businesses are not subject to the same feedback mechanisms.

The first and biggest distinction is that governments cannot (except in truly extreme circumstances) fail. Firms which make subpar decisions (I won't say 'bad', because you only need to outrun the bear) will eventually go out of business as you're outcompeted and profit/credit/investments dry up. Governments can keep spending money forever because revenue derives from taxes, not sales, and they are (usually) not trying to make a profit. You can't count on "what's really needed" emerging because your feedback mechanism doesn't respond like that. You can just break something important and never fix it.

The other big distinction is scope of interest. Businesses usually represent a narrow group of people (shareholders) with fairly straightforward interests (money). Governments not only aren't trying to make money, they represent the interests of countless vying groups. There's a great deal of disagreement on the margins about what they ought to be doing and how. You're going to get contradictory feedback on almost anything you do. One man's waste is another man's critical program.

but I also don't think it's that ridiculous what they're doing

I actually love the principle of it! Take a competent man, maybe CEO of a successful startup, make him the CEO of the government, and have him improve it. The FDR analogy is apt. It should work.

But that requires the attribute 'competent'. Elon should be competent. And yet. I see a lot of evidence that DOGE is swinging wildly, not thinking through the consequences of their actions or how they connect to their long-term goals. The executive orders really have been poorly worded, many appear to have been hastily drafted and made with ChatGPT (even cremieux agrees with that). These were not designed to be good test cases to get a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court on impoundment. Judges don't like seeing chaos and poorly written, immediately retracted orders in a case about extending executive power. For a smaller-scale but illustrative example, cancelling Bloomberg terminals and politico pro because people posted about it on twitter was absurd. Those things are incredibly useful, and Elon is capable of knowing that.

And, as a political strategy, it's just as questionable. You can't cut the federal budget 20% by cutting DEI contracts, you'd need to cut special ed programs, student aid, social security, medicare, the military, etc. Other than the military, all those things are good! (edit: this was ambiguous - I meant cutting all of those things, other than the military, would be good). But it's going to be incredibly difficult to cut those without Congress, that's even farther out there than cutting USAID. And Trump isn't really doing anything to appeal to the swing votes in the narrow Senate or House majorities. So we're going to get small cuts, unless something else unexpected happens. And any plausible funding bill seems likely to cut taxes much more than DOGE's savings will be. The deficit keeps increasing. Voters won't notice DOGE's savings in the noise. So all you get, in terms of building political power, are the headlines about how DOGE CUTS $100M CONTRACT FOR VENEZUELAN TRANSGENDER HOMELESS SHELTER. it's good to cut that, but nobody's going to remember it four years from now during the next election.

What I'd want to see from DOGE are things like - streamline the TSA. Build a hundred nuclear reactors on federal land. Prosecute a lot more PPP fraud. Radically restructure the NIH to fund science better. This is building! I don't expect anything like that though. (That'd take more than a few months, and Elon said he'd only focus on DOGE for a few months).

But it's certainly interesting that they're trying something so unique. Where every other politician has claimed to want to make changes and failed to do so, this strategy might succeed, because it's never been tried before in government.

It has been tried. The thing that got us the Impoundment Control Act was Nixon impounding!

And even ignoring that, given all the above, how new is this really? This administration wouldn't be the first one to try and trim government waste.

This might be a little meta, bit here's a theory about what's happening with Trump et al, and why I'm dubious about reasoned debate even being particularly clarifying.

I remember, back when Tumblr grew popular, being struck by the rise of a specific rhetorical tone. It was a kind of outraged, indignant, wounded "How DARE you defend yourself while I was attacking you!" It was the cry bully tone. I found it deeply infuriating, and it leaked out into all sorts of social media spaces and even into more mainstream media. And in the background, all the various intersectional theories were key to justifying it, because those theories were the basis for the attackers feeling, really and truly, that they were just fighting back and calling out injustice - hence the wounded tone on encountering resistance. There was a strong, assumed element of moral grievance backing it all up. But if you weren't actually onboard with all the foundational intersectional theories, it was enormously off-putting.

And then, despite all that, it was incredibly effective for about 12 years, and cancel culture rose, and 2020 happened, and DEI happened, and Woke Hollywood and Wokeness in games happened, and insanity at universities happened (and is still deeply entrenched), and after a while it became clear that, at least in the short term, people doing the cry bullying stuff actually knew what they were doing, at least in some tacit sense... or at least the people who developed their foundational theories did. Because it turns out that most normal people want to engage with reason and discussion when faced with conflict, and most normal people are very conflict averse and very cowed by public claims of public morality and public offense. And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective. It's an accurate read about a weakness in how normal people react to drama. Actually, even more so, in this particular case, it's also an especially accurate read of the dynamics between radical "marginalized" activists and normal well-credentialed liberals who want, more than anything in the world, to publicly show that they're not low status conservatives, at any cost.

The dynamics here remind me of why people buy guard dogs. At least as far as I understand, and this is obviously not from experience, it is (relatively) easy to threaten people with weapons like guns. You point the weapon at someone, you use loud and menacing tones with specific instructions to push people around and force them to do things so they can avoid being hurt. Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners. And I think that's the logic that unreasonable activists have latched on to. They understand the power of being willing to gun the engine, tear the steering wheel out of the car, and lean in hard to being totally unreasonable. And in the short term, that works great - until the circle firing squads start forming once you've run off everyone who wants to be reasonable, and until enough opponents recognize the trick and then coordinate to massively punish this illiberal defection.

Power in the business world works like this all the time, too, of course - higher management slashes jobs or unceremoniously kills even promising projects for all sorts of reasons, little people get randomly punished through no fault of their own, and being willing to be seen as dicks is actually a major part of the job, because, well, that's just sort of what business is, right? Such people might need to project a certain amount of public reasonableness, but internally, in the hierarchy, saying "no" doesn't need justification, mostly. That's what power is. You get to be the immovable fact of the world, and someone else has to compromise and reason their way around that fact and make the best of things.

Republicans and conservatives have had it hammered in to their heads, the last decade and a half, that preemptively being reasonable, when your opponents have been supine to deeply unreasonable, monstrous people who hate you and are taking active steps to harm you, is a losing game theoretic move. Being willing to be unreasonable and confrontational, to be seen as a dick, to be the immovable fact of the world that other people have to compromise and reason their way around, is a super power and the only sensible move, at least in certain contexts. And in large measure, this is because being that unreasonable forces other people, through their actions, to reveal the actual distance between their rhetoric, on the one hand, and their actual capabilities, values, and priorities, on the other. It makes other people make hard choices. And lurking in the background is something even deeper; it's the willingness to say, "When you were doing something ill-advised, and then I stepped in and said no, I'm taking responsibility for saying no, but I'm not taking responsibility for you getting things to this situation in the first place. The damage that is about to happen is on you." That dynamic has played out especially in relation to the immigration crisis.

Anyway, that's my meta read on the current Trumpian moves, and that kind of flipping over the tea table always generates collateral damage.

Threatening dogs, on the other hand, especially if there are a few of them, especially if they're bred to be guard dogs, is an entirely different matter. The dogs are, in some deep sense, unreasonable. They literally can't be reasoned with. So they function as facts about the world that have to be navigated around, rather than as potential debate partners.

There is an additional factor here- if your threatening dog menaces someone, and you didn't sick it on anyone, the dog may be confiscated and euthanized, but you will not go to prison. On the other hand even holding a gun or knife in your hand while issuing demands is legally fraught(even in self-defense friendly jurisdictions, the rule of thumb is generally that if you weren't threatened enough to kill you weren't threatened enough to pull a gun). "Get off my property!" while holding a gun is de jure a serious felony; a loud and threatening dog is a matter for animal control at worst. If your dog actually attacks somebody it will probably be euthanized, but again, you are unlikely to be in legal trouble- unless somebody can testify that you yelled out 'sick!'- and even then, the legal trouble will be far less than that of even holding a gun in your hand.

To deepen the metaphor even further, while buying into the market of poorly-bred attack dogs does earn you social disapproval, that doesn't seem to amount to much in the end--people keep breeding and buying them, and dogs continue to end up unfit to live in normal human society (and thus, sometimes being put down).

Dr. Strangelove, DVM: Yes, but the... whole point of the dog... is lost... if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you put up the sign eh?

Boy DeSadeski: It was to be announced at dinner on Monday. As you know, our father loves surprises.


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