The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
Didn't a democracy vote in the people that are saying they want to remove some agencies? Isn't that also how the agencies came to be in the first place?
You are right, but america use a two party system, there were only two options, and those options differed in many ways, it is difficult to say if "removing some agencies" was what the people that voted wanted, or if they just preferred that candidate despite them wanting to remove some agencies.
Democracy isn't as simple as that. When you get 49.9% of the vote and can form a government, that isn't carte blanche to do anything and everything. A long-lived democracy depends on governments that take care not to offend the voters who voted against.
Angela Merkel was great at that — even when she had a majority anyway, she'd take care to act in such a fashion that ~half of the opposition voters approved.
Democracy isn't just blind voting. The votes mean nothing if people don't know what the candidates stand for. Manifestos outlining intent and reasoning are part of the process but so is explaining what a policy is intended to achieve as it is being enacted. Without knowing the intended outcome, how can people judge whether it succeeded or not and whether to vote for this candidate again next time?
Assuming you’re genuinely asking, this is a tweet from Vivek Ramaswamy who was not on any ballot this election, but was since appointed to a position that the elected candidate Donald Trump created as part of a net new agency he plans to create during his presidency.
>>The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason.
>>Has that changed?
'that' 'reason' for any government is to ensure its own survival till eternity. Though eternity might not be possible. Its really more on the lines that governments exist to ensure their own survival, and the survival of their interests. Its often a misunderstanding that Government work for the people, they just work for themselves. To that extent, unless the government is going down due to this very reason, Im guessing it doesn't make any sense to chop departments whole sale this way.
Another factor is budgets just don't work the way these people imagine, its not that budgets would reduce or that they would return some money back to the treasury. These sort of actions just mean that budgeting just goes on as is, the money that now is saved will be used up by the other departments. Im guessing the armed forces.
These people don’t want to understand anything. They also don’t want to change anything. They just want the appearance of a steamroller so they can raise more money. Rinse and repeat.
I believe that the agencies have lost the trust of the people. This is what happens under bad and corrupt leadership, e.g. forever wars based on a lie, a person with dementia at the top, a candidate for President with no primaries.
The danger in this situation is that the DOGE will dismantle the safety mechanisms of the state, some of which depend on the state inertia, i.e. it's much harder to execute a coup when there are 4 agencies with overlapping duties.
Time will tell, but it is an end of something for sure IMHO.
I am skeptical that Elon/Vivek will actually cut any Federal spending as the only administration to actually reduce the number of Federal gov jobs was President Clinton from 1992 to 1997.
What I find very interesting is that in the early 1990s when the deficit hit 4.5% of GDP (1992) Congress actually viewed it as a major issue and decided to cut spending but now the deficit is above 6%+ of GDP and reducing spending is an extremely controversial topic.
While true, the larger the ship, the more difficult it is to turn. I think the idea is that for every salaried individual, you have support staff, equipment, benefits, etc that come along with them. It’s also another cog in the chain of work that needs to be done.
For example, there are at least 1200 positions that need to be confirmed. It can take half the presidency to staff a full cabinet. I think we can agree that’s excessive.
The idea that we've lived in this "deficits don't matter" fantasy for the last 25 years (45 years?) is that we have a situation in which nobody ever thinks about why the dollar is the world's reserve currency. Aside from simple path dependency, all of the foundational reasons why it became the reserve currency are hardly relevant any longer. So, we sit here driving the debt car as fast as we can, with no idea what is in front of us. Sure, it might work out, but the fact that many financial analysts don't put any risk premium on treasuries at this point just terrifies me.
There are no clear details about what DOGE will alter. All the information we have so far amounts to outrage-bait one-liners. Where and how are they deciding to make cuts, and which agencies are they planning to change? Cutting is not intrinsically a good or bad idea, but everything I’ve read about this so far makes DOGE seem anti-intellectual.
You say this as if Trump will also not be in control of both sides of Congress. All it takes to make this a department of the government is a vote in Congress.
Unless I have missed something (always a real possibility to be fair) there are also no clear details about what DOGE is, what its powers or lack thereof are, what its staffing is, or what its actual processes will be.
We’ll find out more when the actual Trump administration starts I guess, but so far it seems like a broad concept that two guys can use for tweets.
> there are also no clear details about what DOGE is, what its powers or lack thereof are
It's (edit: going to be after Innauguration Day) a Presidential Task Force
Presidential Task Forces have zero power, as they can only give recommendations.
All this hyperventilating over DOGE is distracting from actual issues to worry about - like the upcoming showdown between Senate GOP Leadership and the Executive Branch over a number of confirmations.
Well, its a department that literally does not exist yet because the regime that wants to build it isn't in power yet. So, maybe have a bit of patience before breaking out the name-calling.
I think DOGE does exist, it just is a non-government entity advising the incoming administration with a deceptive name that makes it sound like a government agency rather than a privileged private lobbying group.
I like the framing of agencies as task forces, because it gives clear goals, then it prepares people for knowing it’s temporary. It also provides an off ramp to resist a situation where admin and bureaucracy always grows.
I’d argue the regulatory unit ought to be temporary while enforcement is ongoing. Permanent organizations are just as ineffective. They did nothing to protect our food supply from ingredients banned in other countries. They did nothing to stop microplastics from taking over the world.
So exactly what are they good for while sitting around pontificating for years on end?
I do like your idea of temporary funding as an automatic off ramp. But my experience is that jurisdiction that have things like temporary levies just end up with voters blindly renewing those levies. Why? Because they’re told a scary story of how the basic services they rely on will be first to go (instead of the agencies cutting out wasteful or non critical spending first). If there’s no choice or competition, you end up being forced to pay for them because of these games.
Even if they’re not temporary though, agencies should have clear goals, metrics, and be held accountable to those. For example how many times have we seen wasteful spending on opaque homelessness programs on the west coast with zero results?
In my opinion we need to rethink how agencies are funded. Why do we need to give a bloated government a big tax check instead of having agencies work hard to win customers and charge them fees? Agencies should also (sometimes but not always) be forced to face competition from alternative private providers to keep the pressure of competition on.
As always I'm putting my money on "nothing ever happens", but I do think it's probably good that we have a serious discussion on what exactly the purpose various agencies serve and refine their missions and processes to actually support them. Will it happen, probably not, but I can dream.
There's a ton of information about every agency out there, but people don't read about them. One of the benefits of government is that it allows people to ignore all the details that make modern life possible.
On the tech stack, it's like claiming that everyone should understand assembly. It's useful for some folks to know assembly, but the vast majority of folks don't care. They just want to use the stuff that's built upon it.
Why anyone would think we're going to get more transparency this time around is beyond me. President Obama started the federal Open Data initiative and Trump, almost as quickly, neutered it just short of axing it. If they cared at all about being transparent, they would have worked on the Open Data initiatives rather than shrouding everything in further secrecy.
I think that's the whole goal. From listening to and watching these people, it seems to me that they want to end democracy and replace it with corporatocracy.
I have friends working for the CS department of one of the main Universities in Argentina. Their salaries are so bad that none of them makes a living - they all have second jobs or international grants. Two of them left to take positions in China and two more are considering it. The list of candidates for open positions is currently empty.
This is a direct result of the president's decision to defund public education at a moment where Argentina ranks 71 out of 79 countries in math (PISA 2023). And if Computer Science is doing that badly, I don't want to think about slightly less marketable careers.
Does Argentina need to reign in corruption? Yes. Was an adjustment necessary? Also yes. But what future are they building and who will benefit from it is far from clear.
There's a lot of discussion about the forest.. how about some discussion on the trees? Both are important?
I worry about cuts to departments that is on clean energy, EV, sustainability in general. (For thinking that Musk is in that industry so it wouldn't happen, there's consideration that cuts on Govt support in that area will actually benefit the one that's ahead.. that's Tesla for the charging network, the EV sales, the peaker plant replacements, etc.)
The only meaningful department they should start with is the DOD / Pentagon. I'm sure they will find room for efficiencies once an audit is complete. However, I won't hold my breathe. Bye bye dept of education.
Readit News
The agencies were democratically put in place for a reason. Removing them with no public discussion of the original reasoning is deeply undemocratic. At the very least, someone thought that the cost of having them in place was less than the cost to society of not having them there. Has that changed?
Angela Merkel was great at that — even when she had a majority anyway, she'd take care to act in such a fashion that ~half of the opposition voters approved.
“Deleting entire agencies” was not part of Donald trumps campaign afaict, his platform page is still live: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
Dead Comment
>>Has that changed?
'that' 'reason' for any government is to ensure its own survival till eternity. Though eternity might not be possible. Its really more on the lines that governments exist to ensure their own survival, and the survival of their interests. Its often a misunderstanding that Government work for the people, they just work for themselves. To that extent, unless the government is going down due to this very reason, Im guessing it doesn't make any sense to chop departments whole sale this way.
Another factor is budgets just don't work the way these people imagine, its not that budgets would reduce or that they would return some money back to the treasury. These sort of actions just mean that budgeting just goes on as is, the money that now is saved will be used up by the other departments. Im guessing the armed forces.
I think they know very well that the fences of democracy are in their way. That's why they want to dismantle the guardrails.
The danger in this situation is that the DOGE will dismantle the safety mechanisms of the state, some of which depend on the state inertia, i.e. it's much harder to execute a coup when there are 4 agencies with overlapping duties.
Time will tell, but it is an end of something for sure IMHO.
What I find very interesting is that in the early 1990s when the deficit hit 4.5% of GDP (1992) Congress actually viewed it as a major issue and decided to cut spending but now the deficit is above 6%+ of GDP and reducing spending is an extremely controversial topic.
You may even increase it and still reduce spending since it's such a small part of the spending.
For example, there are at least 1200 positions that need to be confirmed. It can take half the presidency to staff a full cabinet. I think we can agree that’s excessive.
We’ll find out more when the actual Trump administration starts I guess, but so far it seems like a broad concept that two guys can use for tweets.
It's (edit: going to be after Innauguration Day) a Presidential Task Force
Presidential Task Forces have zero power, as they can only give recommendations.
All this hyperventilating over DOGE is distracting from actual issues to worry about - like the upcoming showdown between Senate GOP Leadership and the Executive Branch over a number of confirmations.
What is “temporary” about validating new food or pharmaceutical products?
So exactly what are they good for while sitting around pontificating for years on end?
Even if they’re not temporary though, agencies should have clear goals, metrics, and be held accountable to those. For example how many times have we seen wasteful spending on opaque homelessness programs on the west coast with zero results?
In my opinion we need to rethink how agencies are funded. Why do we need to give a bloated government a big tax check instead of having agencies work hard to win customers and charge them fees? Agencies should also (sometimes but not always) be forced to face competition from alternative private providers to keep the pressure of competition on.
On the tech stack, it's like claiming that everyone should understand assembly. It's useful for some folks to know assembly, but the vast majority of folks don't care. They just want to use the stuff that's built upon it.
I have friends working for the CS department of one of the main Universities in Argentina. Their salaries are so bad that none of them makes a living - they all have second jobs or international grants. Two of them left to take positions in China and two more are considering it. The list of candidates for open positions is currently empty.
This is a direct result of the president's decision to defund public education at a moment where Argentina ranks 71 out of 79 countries in math (PISA 2023). And if Computer Science is doing that badly, I don't want to think about slightly less marketable careers.
Does Argentina need to reign in corruption? Yes. Was an adjustment necessary? Also yes. But what future are they building and who will benefit from it is far from clear.
Deleted Comment
I worry about cuts to departments that is on clean energy, EV, sustainability in general. (For thinking that Musk is in that industry so it wouldn't happen, there's consideration that cuts on Govt support in that area will actually benefit the one that's ahead.. that's Tesla for the charging network, the EV sales, the peaker plant replacements, etc.)