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Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.
None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.
Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.
In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.
At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.
Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".
Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.
I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?
For instance, with the English language requirements for the trucking licenses, they were in power from 2017-2021 and could have done it then, and they could have done it last year too. Are they too busy? Do they not know about the regulations until someone brings it to their attention? Is it very difficult to change regulations like these and therefore they wait for an opportune time to do it?
I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."
Interesting to think about.
In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.
But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.
The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.
(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)
Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.
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