Saturday 21st of December 2024
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brainstorming with the daleks while trump drives the truck.....

The leaders of President-elect Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have been meeting with Republican lawmakers recently. None of those involved shared details from their meetings, which was by design to allow for brainstorming. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) did say “Government is too big. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well,” adding Musk and Ramaswamy would help usher in change. But how will Elon and Vivek actually seek change? What are their tools to bring to bear?

 

Showdown in DOGE City

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In an op-ed laying out their strategy, the duo said they would link administrative reductions, regulatory rescissions, and cost savings.

Cutting back on the sheer numbers of government employees is a fine starting point for Elon and Vivek. Using the controversial Schedule F, they hope to do away with the unofficial lifetime employment most Civil Servants enjoy. Civil service rules make firing for cause extremely difficult, and grind broader layoffs to a crawl if not a full stop. If Schedule F could be implemented early in Trump 2.0 (the plan was started in Trump 1.0 but failed to get any traction) it would be a decisive tool in clearing out civil service deadwood. They will not go easily, and the terms are tough; Vivek has vowed to cut 75 percent of the federal workforce. “This will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people,” Elon added.

Another strategy for lowering government headcount is attrition. Trump could impose a government-wide hiring freeze, as he did when he took office in 2017, though many feel this may be too blunt an instrument. Musk and Ramaswamy suggest the Trump administration lean instead on separation incentives to get federal workers to retire early or accept buyouts. Elon and Vivek also plan to relocate some agencies out of D.C. and to offer generous severance packages to drive workers into retiring instead of moving.

An attrition move which has widespread Republican support in Congress is to end or curtail telework, back to at least pre-Covid levels. Ramaswamy predicted requiring more federal workers to go into their offices more frequently would cause many of them to quit. “If you require most of those federal bureaucrats to just say, like normal working Americans, you come to work five days a week, a lot of them won’t want to do that,” Ramaswamy said. “If you have many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way, great. That’s a good side effect of those policies as well.” How many Feds telework is itself the subject of much discussion; Speaker Johnson puts the figure at 99 percent of regular office workers, while the Office of Management and Budget claims 80 percent of the federal work hours are currently spent in-person and more than half of federal employees do not telework at all.

As for regulatory rescissions, the federal bureaucracy generates thousands of regulations and rules each year, another target for Elon and Vivek. Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) who will co-chair the House DOGE Caucus, quoted Musk as suggesting the United States is “no longer a democracy, it’s a bureaucracy” and his commission would work to ensure Congress, not “unelected bureaucrats,” dictate regulation. Changing things will not be easy. Agencies generally must go through notice-and-comment rulemaking to amend or revoke rules, though Musk and Ramaswamy suggest Trump may be able to revoke some rules unilaterally via executive order. Musk and Ramaswamy also believe Trump could direct agencies not to enforce some cumbersome regulations or those he believes are unlawful in light of recent Supreme Court precedent. The duo says “we will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.” “He might get away with it,” said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Congress’ power of the purse will turn into an advisory opinion.”

One obstacle the duo cannot overcome is the math of the federal budget. Roughly 60 percent of the budget is mandatory spending — things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Trump promised to protect those programs. Another 10 percent of the budget is spent on paying interest on the national debt. That leaves around 30 percent of the budget “discretionary,” though roughly half of that goes to defense spending, which Trump also vowed not to cut. That remaining 15 percent of the budget, non-defense discretionary spending, is already at its lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP.

That said, Musk and Ramaswamy identified a number of potential reductions.  These include several specific appropriations or federal grants they consider to be wasteful, such as for NGOs, DEI training, PBS, NPR, Planned Parenthood, and $1.5 billion in grants to international organizations. Musk previously advocated removing subsidies from all industries. Ramaswamy said DOGE will closely review CHIPS Act contracts, especially those the Biden administration accelerated.

More generally, law firm Gibson Dunn notes Musk and Ramaswamy have said Trump may decline to spend appropriations for which Congress’s authorizations have expired (called impoundment, confounded by the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.)  The Congressional Budget Office has identified $516 billion in appropriations for 2024 associated with 491 expired authorizations of appropriations across a range of agencies, including a number of appropriations administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs, State Department, Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, Federal Aviation Administration, and NASA.  Withholding such funds is subject to legal challenge.  It would be politically unpopular to cut a number of these programs, such as veterans’ healthcare benefits and Pell Grants.

Musk and Ramaswamy will also scrutinize federal contracts that have “gone unexamined for years,” and conduct “large-scale audits during a temporary suspension of payments.”  Ramaswamy said to expect “massive cuts among federal contractors… who are overbilling the government.” Everyone has a list. Sources of potential cuts could also be the Government Accountability Office High Risk List, which identifies programs particularly subject to waste, fraud, and abuse, and a list of thousands of proposed cuts Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent to Musk and Ramaswamy.

Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com.

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/showdown-in-doge-city/

 

budget torpedoing...

 

Trump-Musk budget intervention: Dress rehearsal for presidential dictatorship    Patrick Martin

 

President-elect Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, intervened to torpedo a budget resolution that was set to pass Congress this week and forestall a partial shutdown of the federal government. The action is the latest of a series in which Trump has sought to remove all limits on the political authority he will exercise once he returns to the White House after his inauguration one month from now.

At issue is not the specifics of the “continuing resolution”—a typically rotten compromise between the ultra-right Republicans and their Democratic counterparts—but the very process by which it was enacted, through bipartisan dealmaking in which the two capitalist parties collaborated on a three-month extension in federal funding. Trump and Musk not only object to any role for the Democrats but to the involvement of congressional Republicans as well.

This is shown by Trump’s sudden declaration that he wants to add a provision to the resolution that would lift the federal debt ceiling, either temporarily or permanently. On Thursday, House Republicans advanced a proposal that would suspend the federal debt limit for two years, which Trump said he supported. 

In past years, measures to raise the debt ceiling have been used by the party out of power to obtain concessions from the party in the White House. Right-wing Republicans have been the main employers of this tactic, most recently in 2023, when Speaker Kevin McCarthy pushed through significant spending cuts in a deal with the Biden administration.

Trump wants to remove this potential check on the actions of his incoming administration, which given the narrow Republican margins of control, 220-215 in the House of Representatives and 53-47 in the Senate, could become a significant obstacle. Moreover, he wants to create sufficient fiscal room to enable the extension of his multitrillion-dollar tax cut for the wealthy.

Under ordinary circumstances, the 90-day extension of spending authority until March 14, 2025 would be considered highly favorable to the new administration, since all major decisions on non-military budget items would be deferred until then, when the Republicans will have complete control of the White House and Congress. (Significantly, the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Pentagon priorities, has already passed Congress and been signed into law by President Biden.)

But these are not ordinary times. It is very possible that Trump wants a federal shutdown, perhaps extending until his own inauguration January 20, in order to generate an atmosphere of crisis and dysfunction in Washington and fuel demands for presidential action of an unprecedented character. 

This would involve either passage of an American version of the “Enabling Act” that gave Chancellor Adolf Hitler supreme power in Germany in 1933 or the issuance of executive orders once Trump re-enters the White House which would have an equivalent effect.

Since winning the November 5 presidential election, thanks to the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and its indifference to the sharp decline in working class living standards over the past four years, Trump has been conducting the transition to his new authoritarian regime on two parallel tracks.

The first is to identify and target any opposition within his own party. His nominees for cabinet and top sub-cabinet positions were chosen from one standpoint only: absolute loyalty and willingness to carry out his orders, regardless of the law or the Constitution. Now he is putting House Speaker Mike Johnson on notice that he will be removed January 3 when the new House meets if he does not toe the line on the budget resolution.

At the same time, Trump is probing whatever institutional restrictions still remain to unchecked exercise of presidential power. He has suggested that he could order the Senate to adjourn for a period of time so that he can install his nominees through “recess appointments.” He is pushing for a military panel that would review the top brass for “loyalty” (to the president, not the Constitution) and remove those who fail that test.

In undermining Speaker Johnson, Trump is setting the stage for the most extreme faction of fascists, the so-called House Freedom Caucus, to block Johnson’s reelection and open the way to imposing a new speaker more directly subordinate to Trump. Some House and Senate Republicans have already suggested that Musk could fill the bill, since the speaker is not required to be a member of the House, only elected by it. The oligarch has not rejected the suggestion.

Trump has declared that he will act as a “dictator on day one,” issuing a flurry of executive orders, including a blanket pardon for the fascist thugs who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and mass round-ups of undocumented immigrants, with millions targeted for arrest, detention in concentration camps and expulsion from the country. For the latter action, he plans to deploy the US Army, even though the use of the military for civil law enforcement is prohibited under the Posse Comitatus Act.

Whatever the ebb and flow of events over the next few days and weeks, one thing is certain: As Trump and his acolytes move to assert dictatorial power, his nominal opponents in the Biden administration and the Democratic Party will do nothing.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre could only bemoan the effective Trump veto of the budget resolution. “A deal is a deal,” she wailed. “Republicans should keep their word.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would wait for the House to pass a continuing resolution, adding, “We have a deal with Republicans, and we’re sticking with it.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “House Republicans will now own any harm that is visited upon the American people that results from a government shutdown, or worse.”

The Democrats are concerned only that they push through as much funding as possible for continuing the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as building up for a wider war in the Middle East against Iran.

Patrick Martin was interviewed about the US political crisis on the “Law and Disorder” podcast. The interview will be broadcast in New York City on WBAI at 11:00 a.m., Monday, December 23, on 99.5 FM and on 150 other radio stations nationwide. It will also be available at lawanddisorder.org

 

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/20/edmm-d20.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

HYPOCRISY ISN’T ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS SINS.

HENCE ITS POPULARITY IN THE ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS…