General Trump Administration F**kery Thread (2025-2029)
- Thread starter OfTheCross
- Start date
Spidey Man
Superstar
Johnson faces GOP rebellion after farm aid collapse — POLITICO
Speaker Mike Johnson's team is scrambling to find a fix. But time is running out before Friday’s government funding deadline.apple.news
Scary hours
Maybe they shouldn't have voted for him again.
Hope this sarcasm
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Trump Replaces His White House Counsel Before He Even Started the Job
The change reflects a renewed focus on who fills key legal posts with direct access to the incoming president, and particularly on a role that was crucial in the first Trump term.
Trump Picks Former Senator and Election Denier to Be Ambassador to China
David Perdue would serve in the role at a time when the U.S.-China relationship is considered to be the most consequential in the world.
Far-Right Militias Seek Role in Trump Deportation Plan
The incoming administration said it would not rely on outside groups to carry out its plan to deport millions of immigrants, but militias have a long record of inserting themselves into patrolling the border.
Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage
The small flurry of threatened defamation suits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.
that's what the media wanted. that's good for ratings.
He was using the "Lolita Express" as his plane while campaigning. These people don't care about Epstein Island. They just want it to be "leftist" celebraties they point their fingers at. When it's Trump or right wings they go silent. They are hypocritical bytches, liars and sycophants.
That’s why we’re seeing the tyt pivot
Poetical Poltergeist
Precise and cold hearted
Trump rambling like an idiot.
FUKUYAMA comments:
Hold On, Elon and Vivek: Firing Federal Bureaucrats Isn’t the Solution - WSJ
Dec. 13, 2024 at 11:00 am ET
In a democracy, elected officials rather than civil servants should make policy. But Congress cannot write detailed rules about, for instance, how many parts per million constitutes the right threshold for regulating a particular toxin or what specific level of certainty is adequate to certify a drug.
Instead, Congress issues broad policy mandates. These are often deliberately ambiguous or downright contradictory because they are the result of political bargaining and compromise. Confronted with vague mandates, agencies then have to fill in the blanks.
Giving legitimacy to this sort of bureaucratic power has been a challenge since the days of the New Deal. The first big effort to deal with it was the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which mandated public notice and a period of comment for any rule change proposed by the bureaucracy. Over the decades, Congress and the bureaucracy itself have added more and more procedural safeguards as a way to make regulatory actions more transparent and accountable.
But as we all know, elaborate procedures create problems. Consider procurement. A federal agency cannot buy a computer or office furniture without complying with the Federal Acquisition Regulations, a document stretching to hundreds of pages. It lays out in agonizing detail how bids from contractors are to be solicited, what sorts of businesses get preferences, how aggrieved businesses can appeal, etc. No private sector procurement officer faces similar obstacles, which explains why public procurement is costlier and slower.
Then there are technical issues, where often only bureaucrats have the expertise to interpret and implement Congress’s broad mandates. This is what motivated a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that courts should defer to an agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of a statute’s language, so-called “Chevron deference” because of the plaintiff in the case.
The current Supreme Court overturned this precedent last June. The justices’ decision assumes that Congress and the courts somehow have the ability to dictate in detail how the broad goals of a law are to be implemented. The ruling essentially blames bureaucrats for filling in the inevitable blank spaces in legislation.
So where should Musk and Ramaswamy begin?
The federal workforce of 2.3 million full-time civil servants is about the same size as it was in the late 1960s. Photo: Melissa Lyttle/Bloomberg News
First, deregulate the bureaucrats.
Federal agencies need more discretion, not less. Many of the rules they follow are not statutory, and one useful function that DOGE could perform is to identify and eliminate the most outdated and inefficient of them. As Philip Howard, the author of many books on simplifying government and founder of the nonpartisan group Common Good, has pointed out over the years, bureaucrats need more freedom to use their own good judgment regarding the implementation of policy, rather than being forced to follow rules.
Today a bureaucrat’s career can end if he or she violates a rule. By contrast, few are punished for failing to achieve real-world results. As in the private sector, we need to reward government officials who take initiative to solve problems
Second, give the bureaucracy more capacity.
The leaders of DOGE seem to believe that the federal bureaucracy is massively overstaffed, with lazy bureaucrats sitting at home in front of their computer screens doing nothing.
The truth of the matter is the opposite: There are the same number of full-time civil servants today—about 2.3 million—as there were back in 1969, despite the fact that the federal government distributes nearly five times as much money as it did more than 50 years ago.
The federal government doesn’t need fewer bureaucrats; it needs more talented and ambitious ones. Only 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, while 14% are over 60. This is not the right age balance for a government that needs to keep up with the latest changes in technology like artificial intelligence. You are not going to attract smart, creative young people to the civil service if you aim to rule them by fear and arbitrary firings.
Third, drastically cut back on contracting.
To make up for its personnel shortfall, the federal government now relies heavily on contractors, and the work of many bureaucrats is simply to manage the contractors they hire. Much of the implementation of federal policies is thus handed off to private actors who don’t have the same degree of accountability as federal employees.
Outsourcing was at the root of the initial fiasco of the healthcare.gov website that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. Outsourcing too often means that the feedback loop among policymakers, those who implement policy and ordinary citizens is broken. Musk and Ramaswamy praise the efficiency of the private sector, but outsourcing frequently makes government less accountable.
The U.S. is unique among modern liberal democracies in its cultural hostility to government. People in other countries understand that government is necessary to control air traffic, forecast the weather, manage the money supply, regulate food and drugs, police stock markets, train and equip the armed forces and deliver social security checks each month.
Excessive government regulation can indeed stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. And governments make mistakes. During the Covid pandemic, public health authorities issued mandates based on imperfect or incorrect information. But government performs many critical functions that we take for granted, and Americans will be upset if they wake up one day to discover there aren’t enough bureaucrats around to perform those tasks.
There is a lot to admire about the federal workforce. Go to the website of the Partnership for Public Service, which every year honors exceptional civil servants with the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. Recent winners include a team from the Environmental Protection Agency that helped Maui deal with the toxic debris and ash from the 2023 wildfires and an Office of Management and Budget official who worked to simplify the “customer experience” across federal agencies. The stories are inspiring and eye-opening.
The solution to our problems does not lie in the wholesale undermining of government but in appropriate regulation. DOGE has a great opportunity to make the federal government more effective, but it must begin with a correct analysis of the problem. It’s easy to blame bureaucrats for the failures of government, but the fault lies elsewhere.
Hold On, Elon and Vivek: Firing Federal Bureaucrats Isn’t the Solution - WSJ
Dec. 13, 2024 at 11:00 am ET
In a democracy, elected officials rather than civil servants should make policy. But Congress cannot write detailed rules about, for instance, how many parts per million constitutes the right threshold for regulating a particular toxin or what specific level of certainty is adequate to certify a drug.
Instead, Congress issues broad policy mandates. These are often deliberately ambiguous or downright contradictory because they are the result of political bargaining and compromise. Confronted with vague mandates, agencies then have to fill in the blanks.
Giving legitimacy to this sort of bureaucratic power has been a challenge since the days of the New Deal. The first big effort to deal with it was the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which mandated public notice and a period of comment for any rule change proposed by the bureaucracy. Over the decades, Congress and the bureaucracy itself have added more and more procedural safeguards as a way to make regulatory actions more transparent and accountable.
But as we all know, elaborate procedures create problems. Consider procurement. A federal agency cannot buy a computer or office furniture without complying with the Federal Acquisition Regulations, a document stretching to hundreds of pages. It lays out in agonizing detail how bids from contractors are to be solicited, what sorts of businesses get preferences, how aggrieved businesses can appeal, etc. No private sector procurement officer faces similar obstacles, which explains why public procurement is costlier and slower.
Then there are technical issues, where often only bureaucrats have the expertise to interpret and implement Congress’s broad mandates. This is what motivated a 1984 Supreme Court ruling that courts should defer to an agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of a statute’s language, so-called “Chevron deference” because of the plaintiff in the case.
The current Supreme Court overturned this precedent last June. The justices’ decision assumes that Congress and the courts somehow have the ability to dictate in detail how the broad goals of a law are to be implemented. The ruling essentially blames bureaucrats for filling in the inevitable blank spaces in legislation.
So where should Musk and Ramaswamy begin?
The federal workforce of 2.3 million full-time civil servants is about the same size as it was in the late 1960s. Photo: Melissa Lyttle/Bloomberg News
First, deregulate the bureaucrats.
Federal agencies need more discretion, not less. Many of the rules they follow are not statutory, and one useful function that DOGE could perform is to identify and eliminate the most outdated and inefficient of them. As Philip Howard, the author of many books on simplifying government and founder of the nonpartisan group Common Good, has pointed out over the years, bureaucrats need more freedom to use their own good judgment regarding the implementation of policy, rather than being forced to follow rules.
Today a bureaucrat’s career can end if he or she violates a rule. By contrast, few are punished for failing to achieve real-world results. As in the private sector, we need to reward government officials who take initiative to solve problems
Second, give the bureaucracy more capacity.
The leaders of DOGE seem to believe that the federal bureaucracy is massively overstaffed, with lazy bureaucrats sitting at home in front of their computer screens doing nothing.
The truth of the matter is the opposite: There are the same number of full-time civil servants today—about 2.3 million—as there were back in 1969, despite the fact that the federal government distributes nearly five times as much money as it did more than 50 years ago.
The federal government doesn’t need fewer bureaucrats; it needs more talented and ambitious ones. Only 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, while 14% are over 60. This is not the right age balance for a government that needs to keep up with the latest changes in technology like artificial intelligence. You are not going to attract smart, creative young people to the civil service if you aim to rule them by fear and arbitrary firings.
Third, drastically cut back on contracting.
To make up for its personnel shortfall, the federal government now relies heavily on contractors, and the work of many bureaucrats is simply to manage the contractors they hire. Much of the implementation of federal policies is thus handed off to private actors who don’t have the same degree of accountability as federal employees.
Outsourcing was at the root of the initial fiasco of the healthcare.gov website that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. Outsourcing too often means that the feedback loop among policymakers, those who implement policy and ordinary citizens is broken. Musk and Ramaswamy praise the efficiency of the private sector, but outsourcing frequently makes government less accountable.
The U.S. is unique among modern liberal democracies in its cultural hostility to government. People in other countries understand that government is necessary to control air traffic, forecast the weather, manage the money supply, regulate food and drugs, police stock markets, train and equip the armed forces and deliver social security checks each month.
Excessive government regulation can indeed stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. And governments make mistakes. During the Covid pandemic, public health authorities issued mandates based on imperfect or incorrect information. But government performs many critical functions that we take for granted, and Americans will be upset if they wake up one day to discover there aren’t enough bureaucrats around to perform those tasks.
There is a lot to admire about the federal workforce. Go to the website of the Partnership for Public Service, which every year honors exceptional civil servants with the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals. Recent winners include a team from the Environmental Protection Agency that helped Maui deal with the toxic debris and ash from the 2023 wildfires and an Office of Management and Budget official who worked to simplify the “customer experience” across federal agencies. The stories are inspiring and eye-opening.
The solution to our problems does not lie in the wholesale undermining of government but in appropriate regulation. DOGE has a great opportunity to make the federal government more effective, but it must begin with a correct analysis of the problem. It’s easy to blame bureaucrats for the failures of government, but the fault lies elsewhere.
ADevilYouKhow
Rhyme Reason
Elon Musk to not receive highest-level government security clearance – reports — Guardian US
The SpaceX head has been advised to not seek the same over his drug use and contacts with foreign nationals
apple.news
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