ARTICLE AD BOX
"Anyone who knows anything about the budget understands that the goals that DOGE has set are basically impossible to reach, and practically nothing it does will significantly impact the debt. As The Economist points out, ... 'no matter how aggressive DOGE is, its actions are focused on barely more than a tenth of the overall federal budget' ..."[E]ven if you let go of 1 in 4 government workers, you’d only reduce federal spending by 1%. You’d need to cut spending by about a quarter to balance the budget, so firing that many people would get you about 4% of the way there....
"But even if DOGE has limited effects on the budget, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have a major policy impact ... the better way to understand DOGE is as a tool to reshape the federal workforce and its activities in accordance with the wishes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. ...
"We can make an analogy here to the way that ... the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union. ...
"DOGE ... maintains direct lines to Trump and Musk, ensuring that departments do not thwart the will of the president and his agenda. Members of the DOGE team have reportedly been conducting short interviews with employees asking them to justify their jobs. This is ostensibly to help the government work better, but in practice this control over personnel selects for loyalty to the administration and a willingness to do its bidding. ...
"Getting past a screening process focused on 'government efficiency', as defined by Trump-Musk ... tells you a lot about a person’s politics.
"We can think of the administration right now as a coalition of three forces: Trump himself, Musk, and the entirety of the conservative movement. Each has its own reasons for being enthusiastic about the DOGE project. Trump would like to be able to do whatever he wants, and not face legal consequences ... Musk in turn has all kinds of business interests before the government, as shown in the figure below. If you’re a federal bureaucrat who makes a decision that goes against the interest of Tesla or SpaceX, good luck keeping your job.
"Conservatives, and probably Musk himself, also want to cut spending. However, that is a fundamentally difficult if not impossible thing to do through the executive branch alone ... DOGE [therefore represents] a scaling back of conservative ambitions. ... Republicans used to dream about cutting Social Security and Medicare and changing the budgetary realities of the federal government at a macro level. Now, they celebrate firing a DEI consultant, which will have no impact on the size of government or our fiscal outlook."
~ Richard Hanania from his post 'DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency'
"But even if DOGE has limited effects on the budget, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have a major policy impact ... the better way to understand DOGE is as a tool to reshape the federal workforce and its activities in accordance with the wishes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. ...
"We can make an analogy here to the way that ... the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union. ...
"DOGE ... maintains direct lines to Trump and Musk, ensuring that departments do not thwart the will of the president and his agenda. Members of the DOGE team have reportedly been conducting short interviews with employees asking them to justify their jobs. This is ostensibly to help the government work better, but in practice this control over personnel selects for loyalty to the administration and a willingness to do its bidding. ...
"Getting past a screening process focused on 'government efficiency', as defined by Trump-Musk ... tells you a lot about a person’s politics.
"We can think of the administration right now as a coalition of three forces: Trump himself, Musk, and the entirety of the conservative movement. Each has its own reasons for being enthusiastic about the DOGE project. Trump would like to be able to do whatever he wants, and not face legal consequences ... Musk in turn has all kinds of business interests before the government, as shown in the figure below. If you’re a federal bureaucrat who makes a decision that goes against the interest of Tesla or SpaceX, good luck keeping your job.
"Conservatives, and probably Musk himself, also want to cut spending. However, that is a fundamentally difficult if not impossible thing to do through the executive branch alone ... DOGE [therefore represents] a scaling back of conservative ambitions. ... Republicans used to dream about cutting Social Security and Medicare and changing the budgetary realities of the federal government at a macro level. Now, they celebrate firing a DEI consultant, which will have no impact on the size of government or our fiscal outlook."
~ Richard Hanania from his post 'DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency'
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