The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at NSF with total disregard for what they were doing or why. Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.

Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.

https://www.wired.com/story/national-science-foundation-febr...

We may be looking at a lost decade.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

The false narative is that it's straight from Greek and Roman era to the Renaissance era as if mathematicians and scientists were just fall asleep in the entire world where in actual fact in the Arab and Muslim world many thousands of books from Greece/Rome/India/China were painstakenly translated (no Google translate, no printing press) and many more new books were written.

[1] Toledan Tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledan_Tables

> Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

...until the extreme-right populists (supported by the current US administration) come to power there too?

We’ve been dealing with our own extreme right parties for the past 20-30 years. They generally bounce between 10-25% of the vote depending on where in the political cycle they are. Like all parties do.

Never enough to dictate policy, but enough to influence when at the top of their cycle.

Compare with the US where only ~25% is needed to take over a party due to abysmal turnouts and electoral system.

These 25% can then win an election allowing the extreme right to dictate policy, as we now see in the US.

The "parliamentary party" is probably to which you refer. The elected congressfolk and legislators.

The political party, the people who run the party, is often elected at the precinct and county level. No idea how European parties work, but I suspect something similar (the UK Conservatives are similar).

Americans may realize that they're a party member and they've never once voted for a party officeholder, and don't even know they can or should be. Whatever percent it is to take over a party, we actually don't know because there is rarely a public vote. They are able to because the leftwing propaganda (NPR etc) have made their consumers dumb as hell. It's a twisted self-perpetuating system with which we have little visibility much less participation.

Harder, but it still happens. That's why Trump is a big fan of Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party:

Fidesz won a supermajority in the 2010 election, adopted national-conservative policies, shifted further to the right and became Eurosceptic. The 2011 adoption of a new Hungarian constitution was highly controversial as it consolidated power with Fidesz. Having set Hungary on a path of democratic backsliding, its majority of seats remained after the 2014 election, and following the escalation of the migrant crisis, Fidesz began using right-wing populist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Following the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election, it currently holds a majority in the National Assembly with 135 seats. It has also held the presidency since 2010, has endorsed the election of every president since 2000, and it enjoys majorities in all 19 county assemblies, while being in opposition in the General Assembly of Budapest. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz)

Let's see how the United States will look like in 15 year's time...

The trick is to be First. You can sell "Just do X and it'll be great" unless the people have already seen what a disaster X is.

TBF, Brexit was a particularly bad idea because of the Northern Ireland situation, so others can still feed the illusion that their *exit would be "cleaner"...

Businesses (especially smaller ones) have suffered immensely as a result of supply chain issues, lopsided bureaucracy and red-tape.

We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.

Reduced health, reduced education, reduced funding for research, reduced international aid programs (which both garner goodwill whilst also creating a bulwark against those who profit from misery), reduced oversight / regulation of the power of capital, alienation of prior allies, reduced safety nets for the vulnerable, increased rhetoric against poorly defined 'foreign types', anti-intellectualism.

It's a helluva vacuum being created, and I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going to fill it.

There's certainly a lot of malice: asking for names of FBI agents who worked on Jan 6 cases, and in putting Tulsi Gabbard over the CIA, refusing to enforce the laws against offering bribes to foreign officials, cutting agencies regulating Trump's and Musk's businesses. But cutting pandemic prep, firing people working on basic technology... that shows that they're both malicious and stupid.

Also...

> Do you think they disbanded pandemic prep because they wanted people to die in a pandemic

Are you familiar with the term reckless?

I mean, yeah, people die regardless of the motive. There's some saying about how boys may throw rocks in jest, but the frogs die in earnest. That's why it's important that people in power try to be careful not to kill people, and why it's important to elect people who are careful and try not to kill people.

But somewhere up the thread, someone said "I'm beginning to think it's malicious and not stupid". If that matters to you, then it matters.

> Are you familiar with the term reckless?

Are they culpable for their decision? Absolutely. The Hebrew word in the Bible translated "foolish" doesn't actually denote a lack of raw brainpower, but a certain kind of flaw in moral character. You can be both intelligent and foolish, just as you can have below-average brainpower and be wise.

But foolish is not malicious. Malice means you intend evil; foolish means you willingly ignored reality to your own detriment. I don't think Trump wanted people to die; he just found the necessity of spending money for pandemic planning inconvenient, and so ignored it.

Packing the top military with loyalists? He certainly intends evil there.

I once saw a video of a guy explaining genuinely how elon can technically reach its number of $ tax payers saved, it required US to invest highly in a digital system like that of estonia.

But oh no , he's going to take your grandma s social security.

Elon musk is both stupid and malicious.

I am not pro billionare , I genuinely believe that there might be very billionaire who aren't ruthless in their business and even a little malicious.

I think its totally possible that Elon can be stupid and be the richest man in the world. I have gotten a Elon Musk biography and I really used to admire him untill he bought twitter and renamed it X. to me , it was something of a collosal waste of branding. Twitter is Twitter , not X , yet Elon made it X , what is its relation ? , its like facebook naming itself J or whatever , I don't know.

It has all been a bad show after that. I think he has shown signs of being both stupid and malicious. He called somebody a pedo without no reason I think. He has a fragile ego , I don't know .

I think we need to stop glorifying ruthless bussinessman like billionaires , I think its hard to say this on a startup forum.

I don't know , I think you can appreciate startups / the freedom it brings (if you are genuinely interested in some tech and feel limited by current employment opportunities) and also dislike billionaires if they are fragile ego.

These two aren't contradictory.

Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent, they set the amount and the goals, and the executive exists to handle the details.

The problem is that the Trump administration is ignoring the laws they don't like. They're even trying to ignore a very explicit constitutional amendment (birthright citizenship). Writing more detailed laws would do nothing to make the Trump team follow the law.

> Laws shouldn't need to go into details on exactly how every last dollar is to be spent.

Laws should go into every detail that matters to those writing it. If all they care about is that the money is spent and that there's an agency with a certain name and one line mandate, sure that's all they need to specify. If the legislators cafe about what is or is not done, or if they care about any specific metrics of success, those should be codified in the law to make the intention and expectation clear.

Birthright citizenship and immigration is a whole other can of worms. We can go there but it's pretty off topic here.

It defines how a President must notify congress to request a reduction in appropriated budget. That request is expected to contain a full accounting if expected financial impacts and reasons for the changes requested. Congress then has 45 days to respond, without congressional approval the request is considered denied.

What they are doing today could fall into a discovery period in which they're still collecting information to make a proper impoundment request. Whether they're actually acting in good faith there is yet to be seen, but they woould have to be allowed to look into and audit departments before being able to clearly lay out how much of the budget is waste and precisely why the reduction wouldn't impeded the departments from meeting their legal obligations.

Note that this law was created specifically because Nixon had gotten into the habit of not spending money as apportioned by Congress if he didn't like the specific programs. So, Congress made laws to specifically not allow Presidents to do this on a whim.

And it is obviously false that funding must be paused in order to understand what the money is being spent on and identify waste. Both companies and government agencies routinely undergo extremely thorough audits without having to pause their activity. "I have a suspicion based on no proof whatsoever that waste might be happening, let's stop activity entirely while I search for the proof I don't have for this unmotivated belief" is not and can't be a good faith position.

This is a little bit misleading, By the time the Impoundment Control Act was passed, the Nixon Administration had been hit by a flurry of lawsuits on impoundment, lost most of them at the trial level, and given up immediately and released the funds at issue in those cases. (There was one case they continued fighting up to the Supreme Court and lost 9-0 after the ICA passed, but not based on the ICA, just pre-existing law; there was also Supreme Court precedent going back to the 19th Century with the same conclusion -- the President has no authority to impound funds Congress has directed must be spent.)

The ICA was basically an olive branch -- it provides a method in law for the President to temporarily hold appropriated funds and request recission, specifying that the funds had to be released if, in 45 session days, Congress didn't affirmatively act on the recission request; this was an effort to provide a mechanism to address the problems that the unambiguously illegal attempts at impoundment were notionally motivated by. It wasn't to prohibit impoundment -- the existing laws directing expending funds already did that inherently.

Is the current structure of agencies with delegated regulatory powers specified in the constitution? I don’t think so. It isn’t explicitly forbidden, but it’s not like it’s what the founders had in mind or wrote down.

The current administration’s approach is activist in the sense that it would be more direct to just outlaw the current structure via congress. I suspect that isn’t possible at the moment due to the entanglement of corporate interests, regulatory agencies and lobbying money.

Activist action isn’t exactly new though. Maybe it hasn’t happened on the right wing as much in America in living memory, it feels like they felt like they were above it for a long time. They don’t feel like that anymore.

The reality is that Congress has been effectively neutralized as a law making institution for at least two decades, barely able to do more than pass the budget and one or two big items per election cycle. The dream of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all the others is that the executive state will be similarly neutered, unable to effectively regulate any kind of big business interests.

The vast majority of the American people neither knows nor cares about the difference between a law that Congress passed and a regulation enacted by an agency of the executive (or between those and state lawd or even city regulations, much of the time). They care whether those rules are useful or detrimental to them. This is why agencies like the CFPB, that Musk and Trump have essentially dismantled (much to Mark Andreesen's delight, I'm sure) was extremely popular: normal people could see how it helped them or their friends. They didn't care that it was pursuing regulations not directly codified by Congress.

The government is designed based on certain principles that define how it is meant to work, and there's a reasonable case to be made that the executive branch should not have the authority to functionally create laws or run their own courts. That just doesn't matter to most people, as you said they're happy if those regulations work for them.

The same situation pops up in most peoples' political views too. Most people pick a view on a topic rather than an underlying principle, ending up with contradictory views.

My father-in-law will talk a lot about older Republican talking points like smaller governments and individual rights and freedoms. Then abortion comes up and he wants governments to create laws telling people what they can or can't do with their body, or social security comes up and he's strongly in favor of more taxes and welfare/entitlement programs.

But that is not what is happening here. A principle is not self-motivatingly good just because it exists. The principle that Congress must directly make every law and set every detail of that law is simply a bad principle, at least for a country of the size and complexity of the USA, and given the last 200 years of experience in good and bad governance.

Congress has long understood this, and so they have invested some of their legislative power into various executive agencies, while still maintaining a great degree of control over the broad strokes of what those agencies do.

It's not useful to anyone for Congress to, say, debate and set the exact safe level of every chemical known to man in water that should be enforced: the EPA exists to study this and take the right measures based on the most reasonable scientific knowledge of the day. If the CDC discovers that exposure to teflon above 1 part in 100,000 is likely to cause significant harm, it shouldn't be regulated only once Congress meets in the next session.

The principle I was referring to is that the legislative branch creates law and the executive branch only only administers and executes on them.

I agree a principle is neither good or bad on its own, it just is. In this case it isn't good or bad that powers are separated this way, but it is foundational to how our government is designed.

Congress doesn't have to spell out every detail, I made that clear though maybe in a separate chain of comments here. They do, though, need to spell out whatever details are important to them. If all congress cares about is that a department exists with a certain name and spends every dollar of a given budget that's fine, but they can't complain at all about what the department does. In reality they should be spelling out fairly clearly what is expected of a department, in my opinion that would include metrics for success.

Obama and Biden both talked about undoing this, but neither did. The Patriot Act still exists, three letter agencies still have authority to spy on American citizens, and immigration laws still defy what's written on the Statue of Liberty (I think most have forgotten how harsh Obama was on southern immigration).

Are you familiar with the constitution? It describes which powers belong to the executive and which don't.

For another example, take the frequent neofascist argument that the federal agencies are "unaccountable" unless they are under the direct command of the President. No, the agencies were created by Congress, and have always been accountable to Congress. But Congress has not been doing its job, which is why they seem unaccountable.

If Congress hasn't been doing its job, then they don't just seem unaccountable, they actually are.

But either way I don't really see what greater point you're trying to make.

You seemed to disagree, and be trying to make a distinction where no practical difference can be found. You also seem to agree that they haven't been held accountable, which makes this apparent distinction even less coherent! This kind of just comes across as contrarian, or perhaps sophistry to avoid agreeing with an apparent opponent?

The mechanism is there. If Congress is not passing new legislation to change agency actions, that de facto means that Congress is content with the current actions. They have been accountable to Congress, and Congress has been content to let them keep doing what they're doing.

I mean, what if Congress created them to be unaccountable? Then both things would be true!

these are very different situations, and it appears you wish to defend the motte and get the bailey for free?

The misinformation era means there's a gulf of frequently incorrect assumptions about what the Federal agencies actually do.

Republicans have been able to stop congress from doing anything they didn't like since... 2010.

They can't even get their shit together to pass legislature when they control congress, but they've always been able to prevent it from passing legislature, or exercising oversight. Just like they are doing right now.

The republicans have been more willing to pull that lever, but the system is designed such that its a perfectly legal lever to pull.

I do agree though that inept congresses has allowed the executive branch to act so powerfully. My only caveat is that congress first had to give those powers to the executive such that they could eventually be abused. Earlier congresses didn't have to choose to empower the executive branch with so much authority.

I don't really buy the argument the argument that earlier congresses should have foreseen their future inability to pass new legislation and done more to preemptively restrict how the executive could have abused general mandates. Passing highly specific fine grained laws would have been ineffective, both in the work required to foresee and draft all the specifics, and also having a few words changed here and there by lobbyists, completely undermining the intent. Congress could have delegated rule making to some sort of sub-legislative body rather than interpretation by the executive, but as I said that would have required them to foresee the gridlock that would leave them unable to clarify. Also, the possibility of having an outright-hostile-to-America-as-they-understand-it executive would have been pretty foreign to them.

I was not talking about the accountability of individual employees according to the law. The accountability I was talking about was the mandate for an agency. That was set by Congress when they created the agency, and can thus be clarified or changed by Congress at any time.

Sure, Congress can change or clarify the mandate of an agency, and the President must go along with that. But what we’re talking about with Trump is accountability for individual employees and the discretionary conduct of executive branch employees.

For example, Congress has appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations, “for purposes of the carrying out the 1961 foreign development act” (paraphrasing). I agree the executive must ultimately spend that money within the broad mandate of the appropriation. But do you spend that money on DEI in Serbia or pro-natalism in South Korea? Clearly the President should be able to decide that.

> UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT > Funds Appropriated To The President

> For necessary expenses to carry out the provisions of section 667 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, $1,214,808,000 (increased by $5,000,000) (reduced by $5,000,000), of which up to $182,221,000 may remain available until September 30, 2026

Section 667 of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act just says the money is for “operating expenses” for administering the Act. Who decides how to spend that $1.2 billion?

> Under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the agency primarily responsible for administering this part should have the responsibility for coordinating all United States development-related activities

"Guidance". Not direct command. The primary criteria of the agency is to carry out what Congress directed by making the Act. If I'm following your argument in this thread, you mean to say that doing so requires execution, is thus executive power, thus putting it under the full command of the President.

> SEC. 104A. ø22 U.S.C. 2151b–2¿ ASSISTANCE TO COMBAT HIV/AIDS.

DEI is a bit of a straw man, but there is an entire section on HIV/AIDS! That's a goal spelled out by Congress, which is meant to be executed independent from the desires of a would be president-king. Obviously the executive has leeway in how to interpret the grey areas ("guidance"), but the wholesale disruption/pausing/scrapping is illegal.

It's truly a travesty because the Republicans control both houses of Congress! They could easily pass legislation suspending USAID, and/or legislation for widespread audits of agencies culminating in DOGE. But they haven't.

Take a look at the EPA "exception" that California has needed in order to impose more stringent fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.

Many forms of commerce or communication that are relevant across state lines (net neutrality rules, etc.) are considered a federal prerogative and states have limited ability to control these.

Yes, states could do more to fund research--and hopefully they will--but no state has the same level of tax rate as the federal government, and while the NSF budget is "noise" in the federal budget ($10B/$1.7T discretionary) it would be quite a big outlay for most states, even for California it would represent 3%+ of the total state budget to reproduce.

Though, now that I look at that number, maybe it's actually an opportunity for CA...

Yet, WA now has a carbon tax for companies operating within its borders. And it was found constitutional by the SCOTUS.

> Many forms of commerce or communication that are relevant across state lines (net neutrality rules, etc.) are considered a federal prerogative and states have limited ability to control these.

The interstate agreements are allowed as long as they don't infringe on the sovereign Federal power.

And there are plenty of workarounds. For example, CA has these ridiculous agricultural inspection stations on freeways. They are legal because they don't technically deny you the freedom of movement, declining to submit to an inspection simply revokes your driving privilege in CA.

Shifting to state-level funding would require states to independently raise new taxes. Each state would have to work within the constraints of its state level constitution for levying that tax. Research would no longer be pork. This seems politically difficult.

States would have to either coordinate on which grants to fund or accept a siloed, fragmented system. That seems inefficient.

Institutes at lower-income states would not be subsidized by higher-income states and fail. That seems wasteful.

All that said, it might be the only alternative.

Interstate compacts exist. For example, states can make an agreement that a company can receive grant funds only if it's incorporated in a state that spends a certain percentage of the budget on scientific research.

San-Francisco (in a ham-fisted way) tried to do something similar, by prohibiting city-sponsored contracts with companies in states that restrict abortion.

That's not quite correct. The judicial practice in the US is that the intestate compacts (agreements) require Congressional authorization only if they infringe on the sovereign Federal powers.

One good example for the 2nd Amendment lovers: states are free to make reciprocal agreements with other states for concealed carry permits. It doesn't require any authorization from the Congress.

Another example are the laws for taxation of multi-state corporations that the neighboring states can negotiate together.

https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4862

That covers everything from paving roads and mowing grass to paying for their pension system and monitoring for wildfires, so the proportional increase for research funding would be even larger than it sounds because federal funding has been the backbone for that since WWII.

While you’d be looking at a significant increase in tax demand for them it’d be much worse for almost everyone else because California is also the richest state in the country, almost twice as rich as the second (Texas). There’s no way that isn’t a bloodbath for American science.

That's not quite correct. The judicial practice in the US is that the intestate compacts (agreements) require Congressional authorization only if they infringe on the sovereign Federal powers.

One good example for the 2nd Amendment lovers: states are free to make reciprocal agreements with other states for concealed carry permits. It doesn't require any authorization from the Congress.

Another example are the laws for taxation of multi-state corporations that the neighboring states can negotiate together.

The US has an incredibly weak form of government.

For example, Trump can't actually force states to change their school athlete programs. It doesn't have any power over individual states (or schools). All his DoE can do, is to threaten to withhold funding. And even that is being contested because the Congress has not authorized it.

However, if he does manage to withdraw the funding, that's just 6% of total spending on schools in CA ( https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/900 ) and 8% in NY. The states will just shrug and go on.

The discretionary part of the US Federal budget is not large, on the scale of the country.

You mentioned CA which is rebuilding from massive fires, can they afford that?

What about Arizona, 2021 to 2022 19% of their schools budget was federal funding.

What happens if there is a natural disaster, Trump can withhold funds to force changes. Can a state turn down that level of assistance? They would have to prioritize recovery I assume and just accept the change.

>Don't get so depressed. The Executive branch in the US does not have a lot of power when it comes to influencing the states.

Money is power

Yes.

> What about Arizona, 2021 to 2022 19% of their schools budget was federal funding.

They are an outlier, but mostly because they spend so little: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

> What happens if there is a natural disaster, Trump can withhold funds to force changes. Can a state turn down that level of assistance? They would have to prioritize recovery I assume and just accept the change.

But many sides can play this game once the can of worms is open.

The thing is, then the next Democratic president (or a Democratic House/Senate) happens and yet another hurricane flattens a part of Florida. What do you think the Florida delegation in the Congress will do when faced with a prospect of not getting help?

> Money is power

Indeed. And the Blue States have way more money than most of the Red states.

Can you explain why you think this?

The financial outlook isn't good, not terrible but still.

"No Capacity for New Commitments State Faces Annual Multiyear Deficits of Around $20b" [1]

>Indeed. And the Blue States have way more money than most of the Red states.

Based on what? Note that GDP doesn't represent available funds to state governments

>But many sides can play this game once the can of worms is open

Trump has already threatened this to California. Two days ago Newsom asked congress for $20b and ..

"Ric Grenell, a Trump ally serving as his envoy for special missions, said Friday that “there will be conditions” to any federal aid for the state.

He said one of the possible conditions being discussed was defunding the California Coastal Commission, which regulates coastal development and protects public beach access. Trump has criticized the agency as overly restrictive, bureaucratic and a hindrance to timely rebuilding efforts."

>What do you think the Florida delegation in the Congress will do when faced with a prospect of not getting help?

Why would you assume the Democrats would do that?

[1] https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4939#:~:text=The%20st...

The budget of California is $320B. This is more than the _entire_ discretionary budget of the US.

> "Ric Grenell, a Trump ally serving as his envoy for special missions, said Friday that “there will be conditions” to any federal aid for the state.

Yeah, these are public statements. I expect that there's frantic back-room dealing right now to make sure that the relief funds are not attached to any conditions. Because in the long-term, that will benefit the states that have money.

> Why would you assume the Democrats would do that?

Because the Democrats who are unwilling to play ball will not get re-elected. I'm not talking about this electoral cycle, this will take a bit more time. For Republicans, it took about 8 years to get from the Tea Party to MAGAs.

I hope so but it also seems people keep thinking Republicans/Trump won't step over a line but end up doing it

>The budget of California is $320B. This is more than the _entire_ discretionary budget of the US.

It's 1.7T https://www.cbo.gov/publication/most-recent/graphics

I'm sure they'll try. But I'm also sure that this practice of using relief funds as for political pressure won't stick, exactly because money is power.

> It's 1.7T https://www.cbo.gov/publication/most-recent/graphics

Thanks! I meant it in a bit different way: not Defense related, not International Affairs, and not law-enforcement/justice related. By my count, that's $330B.

2) Trump hasn’t seized the spending power. Congress was the one that delegated spending power to the executive branch by appropriating multi-billion line items and directing the executive branch to spend the money with only the vaguest instructions. Live by the delegation sword die by the delegation sword.

We'll have to agree to disagree here. You'll never convince me that a phone call from a candidate trying to convince someone to "find" extra votes is an official act of office. Nor is assembling a league of fake electors because the official ones will not bend the knee

This was entirely Jack Smith’s bad lawyering. He chose to write an indictment that mixed together the acts you mention along with things like Trump’s instructions to DOJ officials.

You know what the constitution does require, advise and consent. Not a single thing elon musk is doing is legal and yet their are seizing the power to remake departments created and funded by congress. If you want to eliminate USAID or any other department have CONGRESS pass a law to make the change, anything else is a constitutional seizure of power.

The executive power doesn't include a concept such as impoundment, yet the trump administration seized $80mil of FEMA funds from the the city of new york bank account.

One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening.

This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to regret their vote, yes they likely didn't understand what they were voting for, but that's the flaw in democracy we're aware of.

Is this what everyone wants? Clearly not. But democracy is about majority rule, not consensus.

When an election is canceled then one can talk about democracy dying.

But right now, Americans are just getting what the majority voted for. They may not necessarily like it, but they voted for it. And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it.

Like if or not, the "democracy" part is working well.

Democracy had a bad reputation in the ancient world, because unconstrained majority decisions often led to terrible outcomes. In the modern world, democracy usually means liberal democracy, which includes things like the rule of law and constitutional protections. As a rough approximation, a constitution exists to prevent the government from doing what the voters want.

A constitution in itself a worthless document, and the checks and balances have no power. The power comes from conventions. Conventions on how the constitution should be interpreted and how the people in power should act within the constitutional framework. If too many people ignore the conventions and interpret the laws and regulations literally to their advantage, democracy will die. It died in the Roman Republic, and it has died in many modern republics. Plenty of authoritarian states maintain nominally democratic institutions. And many of them became like that in a way that was at least nominally legal.

Of course unrestrained majority decisions lead to terrible outcomes. This is well understood, and has been demonstrated over and over recently (think Brexit.)

Democracy is objectively a flawed system for this reason. It has never promised to deliver the best, or even good, government. It is what it is.

I agree, this is a literal interpretation of democracy. It is "the will of the people". I'm not sure that anything else could still be even called a democracy.

* Drop the electoral collage * Proportional and/or preferential voting * Term limits/retirement ages * An independent electoral organisation with real teeth to prevent gerrymandering (and verify the election) * Free and easy voter IDs (if ID are ever required) * All election days are public holidays, with requirements to allow workers on the day to vote * Compulsory voting (works in AU) * Minimum number of polling booths per X people * Absentee voting * Changing to a parliamentary system where the president is a figurehead

But there is no such thing as an “independent electoral organization.” The Framers never credited the idea of an “independent” body that could be trusted to be somehow “above politics.” That’s why the constitutional government is like a game of rock paper scissors. Everything can be checked by everything else.

Also, Elon Musk is the richest elite in the world so it seems we already are at the bottom of the problem.

From Gallup [0]—top issues among all registered voters:

The economy

Democracy in the U.S.

Terrorism and national security

Types of Supreme Court justices candidates would pick

Immigration

Education

Healthcare

Gun policy

Abortion

^^Taxes

Crime

Distribution of income and wealth in the U.S.

^^The federal budget deficit

Foreign affairs

Situation in Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians

Energy policy

Relations with Russia

Race relations

Relations with China

Trade with other nations

Climate change

Transgender rights

^^Items under which "firing all federal workers" could conceivably fit, and that's a massive stretch. Still, even with that generosity granted, they're 10th and 13th on the list.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...

The credentialed elites are the Ivy League graduates who go work for government and do things like have the SBA make loans to minorities that white people aren’t eligible for: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/court-rules-biden-admin-di.... They’re the ones who see, for example, immigration and affirmative action as moral causes—even though most voters oppose both—and have injected those ideas into all our government programs, corporate HR, etc.

What happened is that a plurality of voters decided that they’d rather have billionaire industrialists in charge than the Ivy League pencil pushers.

And I think this is -- at least for now -- actually a good thing. Because if we could rewrite the constitution, I suspect it would be rewritten by the same kind of people who wrote the Project 2025 playbook.

Sarcasm aside, I'm seeing a lot of wackiness on both sides of the political spectrum lately. The Constitution is fine and provides provisions for changing it via amendments. You guys aren't involved in the political process at all, I caucused and was a delegate so I can tell you the system is fine and working as intended. Don't complain about it if you aren't even involved in the process. That just makes you look silly.

I'd be worried about the Chesterton's Fence problem when removing bureaucracy simply because we don't like that it gets in our way.

It’s also incorrect to assume that the bureaucracy averages out to the same place as the public. Public support for increasing immigration, for example, peaked at 35%. It’s never been popular. But we have been getting more of it for decades: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi...

They design a federal government that was purposely hamstrung by the states. It was poorly funded, had no standing military, only briefly had a federal bank, and had very limited purview of authority that didn't fall down to the state level.

If we want to remove bureaucracy while also rolling back many of the federal powers created over the last century or so I'd be all for it.

Removing one without the other either seems pointless (bureaucracy without authority) or risky (authority without bureaucracy) in my opinion.

That makes it more, not less, important for that expansive government to be highly responsive to elections.

What is not tenable today, or ever, is firing the people with these skills every four years and re-hiring replacements, to the extent that this happens at all, based on ideological tests.

Yes - every lawyer I’ve met considers it their professional obligation to work on their client’s behalf, even if it’s behaviour they personally disapprove of. This is especially true in government where the merit-based civil service is centered on following laws and policy.

Biden didn’t have those scary-sounding “mass immigration policies” - he asked Congress to pass much-needed reform but limited his actions to what was authorized under existing law.

Your second link supports my point: there were changes between administrations but many of the people who worked for Trump also worked for Biden, and they followed the policies given by the current president. That’s the role you accept in that job, trying to interpret those policy directives under the various applicable laws, and everyone who applies to be a civil servant knows that this can mean big changes from administration to administration.

This is precisely what lawyers do. They try to make the best argument for their client's case. If they do not want to make that argument, they let their client find a new lawyer (resign, if they work for the government). They don't make a shitty case because they think their client is wrong. (That being said, they cannot lie without professional repercussions.)

P.S. There were no mass immigration policies under Biden. You have been misinformed.

I don't know that I've ever actually heard someone talk about the "deep state" to refer to career bureaucrats just doing their jobs in large government orgs / a messy system.

Nor does the “constitution” support your view. Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

What you’re calling “democracy” and the “constitution” is neither. It’s Wilsonianism, an idea invented by a eugenicist who hated the constitution as well as democracy: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/woodrow-wilson-s-c...

I was not defining democracy. I was describing the common real-world usage of the term, which has a more specific meaning than simple majority rule. It is commonly used as a shorthand for "liberal democracy". Some Americans use "republic" for the same concept, but that's misleading in other ways. Partly because some countries that are commonly understood to be liberal democracies are constitutional monarchies. And partly because some actual republics (such as North Korea or the member states of the former USSR) do not match the concept particularly well.

I was also not talking about any specific constitution, but constitutions in general. They all come with implicit and explicit assumptions that must hold, or the system will not work as intended. If some entities are supposed to function as checks and balances to each other, they are expected to remain independent. If they choose to collude instead, nobody is capable of stopping them if they decide to twist the constitution beyond recognition or outright break it.

I said that a constitution on its own is worthless. That means a constitution cannot enforce itself. There must be some people who are capable and willing to enforce it. But if they are capable of enforcing the constitution, they are also capable of breaking it. Which means there must be other people capable and willing to act as checks and balances. And so on. The system may work as long as those people act within the expectations, complying with both the spirit and the letter of the constitution. But if they reject the expectations and start looking for loopholes to take advantage of, they may find some. If that becomes too common, the constitution becomes worthless, because the people who are supposed to enforce it no longer believe in it.

I do agree with the general gist of the point you are making however. The Constitution itself holds no special power, it is the State's monopoly on violence that does.

If you vote, but your votes don't matter, you aren't a democracy. You are a democracy when your votes meaningfully influence policy. In that sense, we aren't even a democracy right now.

It's worth considering that Russia has elections too. They aren't meaningful for many reasons. Real opposition candidates might be assassinated, or a candidate might be run with the same name to confuse voters, etc.

Gerrymandering and unlimited campaign contributions are prime example's of how "It's all about how he comes to power" is correct, but your conclusion is flawed.

Voting doesn't make you a democracy. Voting can be ritualized. Voting can be a form of cargo-culting (Feynman speech worth reading): https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

  "In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people.  During the war they 
  saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same 
  thing to happen now.  So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, 
  to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a 
  man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and 
  bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they 
  wait for the airplanes to land.  They’re doing everything right.  The 
  form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it 
  doesn’t work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things Cargo Cult 
  Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of 
  scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, 
  because the planes don’t land."

There is much more to the idea of democracy than voting.

> The state election board and a Donald Trump-appointed federal judge have dismissed Griffin’s argument that the missing information should invalidate votes.

The protests you speak of have already been dismissed (the last link in the quoted section).

Seems like the system is working as intended, even under ostensibly adversarial conditions?

Why do you think that a government that is not bound by the need to follow the law, and has already demonstrated malicious intent will... Actually follow the law?

Except that this is completely false. These haphazard cuts are a miniscule portion of the federal budget, even assuming they don't incur a whole bunch of second and third order costs. The exact same administration doing those is going to burn literal orders of magnitude more money on tax cuts for billionaires, border security theater, and other corrupt nonsense. Federal finances were in bad shape a year ago and are going to be absolutely horrid a few years from now.

And it plays very well with an electorate who wants to see "big changes". That thr changes will hurt them is the point missed by most.

Killing federal departments also plays well with those encumbered by red tape. If there's no CFB there's no one getting in my way to treat customers badly.

USaid buys (bought) a lot of food from US farmers , so in effect that subsidy is going away (without the bad press). The money "going to Ukraine" was being spent at US munition suppliers, so really, it'll hurt those suppliers.

Where I disagree is that there may have been an expectation that the systems outside of "The President" would have stood up for themselves more, offered more resistance and slowed him down more. The slow-moving of government is (was though to be) it's own protection to some extent.

The voters have voted out any congress people who resisted, sending a clear message that they want this path.

This may not be the pretty side of democracy, but it is democracy.

My point above (which I see is being downvoted) is not thst I see this as "good" , but rather that I see it as democratic. Everything going on is literally because the people voted for it. The stacking of the Supreme Court, the obstructionist behavior in congress, the tolerance for (Trump) crimes- this has all been rewarded, not penalized by voters.

If democracy is the will of the people , then what you see seeing is the power of that will.

And of course, who really believes the election results when you have Trump saying that Musk rigged some voting machines in his favor.

Face it, the US no longer creates its government from the collective will of its citizens. They’ve replaced politicians with corporate backers for the actual corporations themselves.

I think if Biden had decided up-front that he wouldn't seek re-election, and the Democrats had been able to field a real primary, Trump may not have won. Instead we had an old man making blunder after blunder during his campaign, followed by a not-all-that-popular replacement that no one selected through the primary process, who only had a few short months to put a campaign together. Frankly I think it's impressive Harris did as well as she did.

"Mandate"... oh, please.

He campaigned on bringing prices down and exacting revenge. So far failing on the former and going strong on the latter.

This administration has made it clear that they think that the current President should have the power of a king, and the reign to match. We're in uncharted waters and there's rocks ahead.

> And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it.

They are worried about getting primaried and their primary opponent being financed by Musk.

Musk was a big part of the inner circle before the election. His track record is well known.

In other words everything that is happening was predictable and predicted. Voters knew what they were voting for. Those who are surprised really weren't paying any attention.

The voters were kept away from these predictions. They were too spicy for mainstream media, not mainly because the media are in Trump's pocket (except Fox, OANN -- all the explicit propaganda outfits), but because people shoot the messenger when the messenger delivers bad news. They like hear about bad news afflicting other people. If it afflicts them, if it triggers their anxiety, they think, "You've made me feel bad. This is unpleasant. I'm going to go look at pictures of puppies and kittens."

He is going after departments that are conservative darlings like the Defense department. I can’t remember any serious person saying we need to cut spending and fire people at the FAA.

If he had thought that voters wanted Project 2025, why would he disavow it during the campaign?

Trump literally said that he would be a dictator on day one. I heard tons of interviews with Republicans saying they'd be ok with Trump acting like a dictator.

Republican voters knew Trump would do unconstitutional things, and they liked it.

They so very much could have.

These evil fucks can just say what they’re planning before they do it and you still get people going “how could anyone have known?” It’s incredible.

And having Musk alongside him entirely destroys the family angle (media-prop children aside).

My point there was only that he does seem to actually care about and love his family, especially (maybe mostly?) his kids.

These days folk getting approved by the senate just have to show up. No one believes RFK when he says he's changed his mind on vax. I mean, these guys are lackeys, not stupid.

Democracy is about letting people who have no understanding, who pay minimal attention, who are easily led by media and populism, choose who should be in charge.

It is working as designed.

Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse.

If the population votes him a 3rd term, If they vote for congress who supports that- that is democracy. The people will get what they vote for.

We are literally seeing what "govt by the people" looks like. This is not democracy dying. It's democracy showing its flaws.

> Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse

I think there's a lot of room for improvement here. Eliminate the senate. Dramatically expand the house. Eliminate the electoral college. Sane district boundaries. Etc.

If the red states don't feel like having elections, then I guess their legislatures will be directly appointing electors to send to the electoral college. Outcome will be the same, more or less, as if they held elections.

It might seem like a bizarre thing to say about the USofA, but we were not far from not certifying the previous election with an opposition led congress.

It’s not hard to understand why people believe Trump Is a Russian asset

I’ve had a similar debate over the DOGE effort to install political commissars throughout the executive branch. There’s one alarm about how skipping a lot of safeguards would make it easier for an adversary to get inside (either by compromising one of their people or relying on the defense being so disrupted) but there seems to be an equally strong argument that a foreign intelligence agency might choose to stay out because nothing they could do would harm U.S. interests more and getting caught might trigger a strong enough reaction to halt the damage.

The biggest asset of the US was that it was a trustworthy business partner. US would fuck you over, but in 90% of cases within the limits of law. Dollar is the world's currency because long-term, it's the most stable currency. And so on.

I think that only Europe has the established institutions to replace the US. Yes, China is powerful, but China is not trustworthy enough to make long-term deals with. Yes, Europe is a much worse option than the US, but it's the second-best thing. Now, if Europe also falls to authoritarianism, then modern world as we know it will end.

many here see it way (me too, though i'm well aware that many times whenever i was critical of Musk, he happened to be right, and in this case - Musk is naturally not anti-science guy, so i'd guess there must be some other reason for him doing that which i'm just not able to see).

I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions. In particular what is the expected state near, mid, and longterm and how the current actions are supposed to result in it. It would be great to have it with some ballpark estimates.

His interest in money has led him to beliefs that he gets the most money if he cuts as aggressively as possible and pushes others to do as much as they can for as little as they will take. "Efficiency" to protect him from things like taxes or regulation, at the expense of anyone else's desire to not be cut to the bone.

And he's getting power by making a trade - he gets Republican approval by cutting a Federal workforce that right-wingers have long complained about. In exchange they give him power. So even if those cuts don't make a material dent on the national budget or debt, he'll have taken advantage of that power to make a few specific actions to benefit him personally.

Look at the difference between how he talks about space and how NASA does, say. Mars? Not science, not research, but just a place to plant a colony beholden to him that he can tax (without using those words) as much as he wants.

In the immediate it seems to have cut short the next generation of scientists leaving more of the entrenched old hands.

Same for "science". That's a long term investment with long term returns. Kill that now for immediate tax breaks. Let someone else worry about the fallout 10 years from now.

Then there's direct interest. The CFB regulates companies processing payments to protect consumers. X wants to process payments without that pesky oversight. CFB is gone.

Musk and Trump sell this to the masses as saving money. Which the masses assume means lower taxes for them. Whereas the billionaires understand it's to remove services from the masses to route more money to themselves. The masses are easily duped - this is literally democracy in action.

He's doing it because hate for government employees has been a talking point since Reagan. He's getting huge accolades for sticking it to the evildoers. It's popular and fun.

That's the stupid thing in the end. Gut the parks service, here's your $500 tax break on your several hundred million+ income.

Billionaires aren't the ones going to national parks. So they don't care if they're closed.

In the short term, as I understand it, the goal is to root out fraud and abuse. For decades many people from both sides of the aisle have believed the government wastes money, that is nothing new. The current moves somewhat rhyme with the early Clinton administration. Whether that is Trump's goal or not is largely speculative, but those I've talked to that support him see this as the goal.

The mid and long term goals vary wildly depending on who I talk to. Some still view it like old school republicans, small government and states' rights. Others want a government just as large and powerful as today but focused on different goals and moral views.

The question I've yet to hear raised or disavowed by the Trump supporters I know is whether this is leading to fascism. A supposed billionaire running the country with his billionaire friends in toe sure seems like industry take over of government.

Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.

And the whole "democrats are Marxists" talking point is ridiculous. There are no paralels here, just a authoritarian and anti democratic movement successfully demonizing other side regardless of truth.

From what I've seen we don't yet have a clear vision of what their end goals really are. They've talked about waste and fraud, and what they've done so far could be to that end. Going out a layer and you find people around them, and Project 2025, that seem to talk much more towards privatizing the government. I haven't seen enough to know which way it will go, but its been moving so quickly that I can't keep up with everything.

I didn't say "democrats are Marxists" and I didn't intend to imply that. To say there are no parallels is disingenuous at best. Wealth distribution is a great example that is common in both groups, as is anticapitalist and anti-meritocratic views and policies.

That doesn't mean democrats are Marxists or that the party is Marxist. It does, though, mean that there are policies many Democratic voters or politicians support that align with arguments Marx made (and that doesn't inherently mean the ideas are bad ones).

Waste, fraud, and abuse are completely subjective and at this point arbitrary terms to a guy who thinks Putin is aces, calls Zelynsk is a dictator, and claims Ukraine stayed the War with the country that invaded them... twice. If he's unwilling to recognize a shared reality and set of objective truths with us, how would we not be complete idiots to believe his version of waste, fraud, and abuse comes straight from the upside-down and its real value is as a catchphrase that capitalizes on people's preconceptions of the government.

The goals of conservative movements were always visible and open, alteought enablers preferred to demand everyone uses euphemisms.

2 ) You did used those words. You knew it was exaggeration and even now you are exaggerating. Plus even milder claim is purely false. You got what you wanted politically, so this strategy of false equivalencies, of blaming democrats of what conservatives do and plan to do is getting really hollow.

Bo sides were not the same, you just create such impression by using euphemisms for one side and exaggerations for another one.

3.) No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy. They never wanted ine, occasionally using that word to manipulate. Right now, qualified woman amd black man were removed from leadership position amd replaced by mediocre unqualified man.

Right now, qualified people are replaced by unqualified loyalists.

I live in a mostly red/republican state. I don't know anyone who had actually read Project 2025 or could tell me what's in it. For sure it shows the intentions of those who wrote it, but you are generalizing far too much by saying it makes clear the motivations of a broader conservative movement.

> Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.

This is an exact quote from my earlier comment so we aren't out of context here. I did not use the words "democrats are Marxists." I do raise the potential that some Democratic policies lead towards a Marxist end, but in no way does that say they are Marxist or prescribe an opinion of the entire party or voting block.

What euphemisms are you claiming I made earlier? Some context there would help, I was trying to give clear examples and make direct statements but maybe I didn't do that well

> No one on the right has any business to use the word meritocracy.

Well I'm not on the right or claiming what the right (or Republicans if that's what you mean) can or can't say. I agree that at a minimum the Republican platform right now is pretty contradictory with regards to merit and that's a problem. That again wasn't my point though - I was making the claim that some Democratic voters and politicians support are opposed to meritocracy and that view aligns with Marxist writings. Are you disagreeing with me there, or just wanting to deflect to what the Republicans are doing?

Elon Musk's parents and grandparents were adovactes and beneficiaries of a violent, racist apartheid South Africa. His dad had children with his step-daughter.

Fred Trump was arrested for participating in a KKK rally and prosecuted for racist discriminatiory housing practices.

How do you land on Trump and Musk being far from violent ugly racism?

Now all it does is make people think that's a ridiculous defense and look through your post history and it becomes obvious the purpose of your account.

I also don't have multiple accounts or hide replies behind dummy accounts, people can think whatever they want about my comment history.

What exactly are you trying to get at here? What in my comment history, or in this thread, are you claiming shows some ulterior motive to my account?

But Musk and DOGE, there is a simple explanation. Musk has learned that you take a chainsaw to sacred cows, then fix the 10% that were really bad mistakes, and that is the easiest way to cut through bureaucracy. So he's trying that, at scale.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like he'll notice most of his bad mistakes. Because it is at scale, and his attention doesn't go that far.

It really doesn't work for huge complex systems where the breakages aren't felt fully for many years, and building the systems back up take decades, and things break so far down the line that it's impossible to even tell what needs to be fixed.

I have to hope that the intentions are actually good, because the appearances from the outside look a lot like the start of a dictatorship.

This takes a non-zero amount of time and it takes careful consideration by subject experts.

I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

What does success look like? How long should the chaos and pain last before you’re beyond hope? Will there be remuneration for people that are materially hurt by this scorched earth policy? How will you be hurt, personally?

Sometimes it involves people, too. I did consulting work at a company that maintained an entire department of dozens of people who did nothing but mechanically opened spreadsheets that were dropped into a share, copied a specific set of rows from them into another spreadsheet, and then copied that spreadsheet into another share. It turned out the entire process was redundant, because what it was built to temporarily fix had already been permanently fixed elsewhere, and they still kept growing this useless department for years. Happily, the majority of these people were reassigned rather than fired.

For a collection agency, breaking these things is temporary pain. For a government, it can be deadly for constituents.

> I can’t really speak to your hopefulness of good intentions - as a parent that relies on government agencies to help my special needs child with the tools she needs, I see no hope here.

I am really sorry to hear that. It's not a good position to be in. I have a trans child myself, and I am also worried about being able to care for them in an environment that is increasingly hostile. I've spent weeks of this past month depressed and panicked over the current "governance". I'm just trying to cope, and sometimes that involves a bit of denial.

> What does success look like?

Don't get me wrong here. No success is possible. If their intentions are good, they're still destroying things that will kill people and take decades to repair. There will likely be no remuneration. I'm just hoping for the outcome that is least bad. I have zero hope of anything good resulting.

2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.

3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.

It makes sense in US because of for-profit universities and easier immigration. That is not situation over there.

China has some immigration, and people will be attracted to stay if the research jobs are good and accessible. If China takes over the USA's role of the preeminent world power, they will have access to and need to leverage world talent to do so.

Write to your representatives. I fear that if they don’t pull off something the only ethical and responsible thing is civil war. This shit is insane and will destroy everything I like about our government.

Also to quote every true patriot: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

I’m so angry and mad and wanting to help fix it. My near term approach is write expansively to all my city state and congressional reps.

We already have diarrhea inducing corruption happening in plain view. We have walking piñatas for an urgent need to do campaign finance reform.

I’m not sure if there’s any way to save some of the institutions and programs that make this country actually great without a straight up secession/civil war for the coastal states.

I’m very very scared. And angry.

The biggest check on the administration is the Senate which confirms executive nominees. The Senate is definitely not “representative” of anything when Wyoming gets two Senators just like California.

The "big beautiful bill" has to be budget neutral to pass. Meaning to get those tax breaks, funding has to be slashed.

This is all about money. Republican voters believe a cheaper govt means less taxes for them. They don't appreciate the benefits they're getting. Hence they cheer as they lose those benefits, and they'll cheer just as loud when the rich get tax cuts.

The money being saved ain't for you.

> there's nothing illegal about what the executive branch is doing

Why do you believe that? There are a lot of people filing lawsuits saying that there's a ton illegal about how the executive branch is doing things, and quite a few judges agree enough to order Trump to stop doing what he's doing until we can figure out what's going on.

what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions.

a few things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered.

after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up

I am at a loss for words. I guess the real problem with propaganda is getting high on your own supply.

edit: As an example, the Supreme Court overturning Chevron deference was a decision against un-elected officials making government calls, instead of the law makers, aka Congress. Now, just months later, here we are. The exact opposite is happening. The most un-elected, un-appointed person in US government history is holding the purse strings, and not a chirp. While Musk's cithara gently weeps.

There’s no inconsistency between Loper Bright and DOGE. Both reflect separation of powers. The judiciary interprets the law, not the executive branch. But the executive branch—which consists of the President and his agents—decides how to make discretionary spending decisions and hiring and firing of federal employees. Everyone is staying in their lane.

(You’re incorrect that DOGE is “holding the purse strings.” Congress has passed appropriations bills that delegate massive discretionary authority to the executive. DOGE, under Trump’s directions, is countermanding spending decisions made by executive civil servants, not Congress.)

Let's just focus on this part for a moment. Could you please share this evidence?

Trump is a known liar. It's why his supporters are always telling other people not take him literally

They lied about $50 million for condoms in Gaza, just like he lied about Haitian immigrants eating pets and the dozens of other lies he spews out daily.

DOGE has posted a ton of lies about what they saved and cut, including contracts that were already canceled or completed, and including amounts orders of magnitude off.

That organization has many employees, not 2 like Trump claimed.

It operates in countries around the world, not just Bangladesh. It's unlikely all those funds were spent in Bangladesh there like Trump was claiming.

Bangladeshi government officials can't confirm Trump's claim.

Musk/DOGE lied about what the funds were used for, and lied that they somehow saved the money by cancelling the contract - the funds were already almost entirely granted. Cancelling a contract doesn't mean those funds already spent are returned.

The org does monitor elections, but did you know that the US also has international observers during our elections?

There's no indication any funds went to election interference. A quick browse of their site shows they conducted a few surveys and held some workshops to encourage women to engage in the the political process - if you consider that election interference, I'm not sure what that says about you.

Seems like a great idea to me in a country that frequently ranks near the bottom in studies of global women's rights.

This is the problem. Trump and Musk spew out lies and make wild out-of-context claims, they get repeated thought because it fits a partisan view. But it takes effort to debunk lies so they spread faster than they can be responded to.

Some of this is bad (war on terror), some of this is good (liberal democracy), and ultimately if you don't like a liberal international order wait until you see what the illiberal one looks like (e.g. Chinese overseas police stations).

If it's unintentional, then DOGE faile the critical thinking test. Doesn't say much for them or their leadership.

It is a decapitation strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_(military_strateg...

Ukraine is more or less a proxy war between America and Russia, which is also between John Locke's Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, which said simply is whether rules are made in respect to reason (law) or in respect to power (order). It's also a fight over who are the final enforcers of law. Are citizens the last line of enforcers of the law or is "law" always enforced by the strong against the weak?

America has the world's largest military and a world ending nuclear arsenal, so direct conflict is unconscionable. That means what's left is high leverage asymmetric warfare. Russia corrupted America's elites (and German elites to a significant degree, too), either through money, compromising material, or the promise of power. Some of those elites are people like Peter Thiel, who are absolute power houses of the American surveillance capitalist state. Private intelligence companies were leveraged to divide the American public and then conquer it.

America is experiencing a decapitation strike. By compromising our leadership, our economy and technological flywheel is being destroyed, our ideology is being corrupted, and trust in us has been decimated. Our closest allies now see us as someone who must be weakened and defended against. We abandoned Ukraine. There is no argument that Trump's America is good faith in any way.

It's a decapitation strike.

The point is to damage us and our future, and we're letting it happen. Our military that took an oath to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic have failed their obligation. Now America at large is rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. Americans are obeying in advance.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK)

- - - -

the way to stop humanity from being able to fight back (against alien invasion) is not via weapons, but via disabling science. It's a long term strategy.

So the conspiracy theory that trump is a russian asset (or is influenced by them at the least), seems plausible, if you imagine that such removal of science and research funding is meant to disable american technological progress for decades to come. This would be a strategy that outlasts the tenure of the russian asset.

Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.

I’d say the leader of the executive branch who is unconstitutionally restricting (without an act of Congress) money that Congress lawfully appropriated, thereby seizing most of the power of the purse.

If the president can pardon contempt, then the president has the power to exempt a person from the obligation to show up in court, admit guilt, or experience consequences for their crime.

That was the moment of structural executive supremacy and an actual constitutional crisis -- when the law contradicts itself calling the laws themselves into question.

Also, this attitude is kind of counter to the egalitarian notion a lot of HNers hold that you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.

> you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.

not at all the same. the point here is about incentive structure. If you're a great scientist, why aren't you doing the science? something made you decide instead to be a career bureaucrat.

There are lots of reasons that excellent scientists might not want to actively do research anymore. Being a PM seems like a nice way to get a broad exposure to cutting edge research without dealing with the (IMO) overwhelming incentive structure in academic science, driving a narrow research program at a national lab, or leaving the world of open science to as an industry researcher.

Personally I'm not sold on their tactics so far, but there is another way to view this than thrashing out.

Non-probationary federal employees are protected and not easily fired. If one honestly believes the government is bloated and so far into debt that the budget needs to be balanced at all costs, cutting anyone and anything you can may make sense.

Normally you wouldn't throw good food overboard, but if the ship is sinking you may have no choice other than to throw out anything that isn't bolted down.

It isn't about funding science in my scenario, its about funding the government.

That depends on what the options are. The executive branch likely does have authority to fire probationary employees. They likely don't have authority to immediately fire non coronation dry employees or to end programs and departments created congress.

This may be the best lever they think they legally have today. If that is the case, and that's an if, they are trying to stick within the letter of the law despite how it is often being reported.

The worst thing is that the fear of the US becoming Argentina may drive a series of actions that turns the US into Argentina. Well, I'm using them as the poster child here, but really a lot of the Latin American countries have similar economic problems which have been through socialist revolution/CIA-backed coup or vice versa and come off worse each time. It seems this has spread north.

They did manage to effectively disable their greatest geopolitical enemy and cause us to destroy ourselves.

All the weaponry in every other country on earth couldn't harm America more than what they did with social media, some highly skilled "recruitment," and smart leveraging of monetary resources.

They got us to vote against Ukraine at the UN without a gun. Even the worlds best weapons aren't that effective.

As has been shown multiple times in debates, the only actually adversarial environment Trump has allowed himself to participate in (Obama went to the GOP and explained the ACA to them for three hours, in a town hall setting, completely televised.) Trump has shown himself to be completely and totally manipulatable. Easily baited, played like a glass harp, so to speak.

But that is not science.

That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.

This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.

Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.

This really feels more and more every day like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping

DataBricks is a multibillion dollar company and was based on research at the AMPLab UC Berkeley, which was funded by an NSF Expeditions grant. https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/news/amp-awarded-10m-nsf-expe...

Duolingo is a multibillion dollar company and was based on NSF funded research. https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-gave-duolingo-its-wi...

My previous startup, Wombat Security Technologies, was based on NSF funded research of just $1.2M. It led to over 200 jobs, and we helped protect millions of people around the world through our cybersecurity training.

I'm sure there are dozens of other startups that I don't know of also based on US Federal funding from NSF and NIH.

Strong science leads to a strong economy, and a strong economy is essential to national security.

We're also in an AI arms race with other countries around the world. Cutting science funding right now is a massive self-inflicted wound.

For everyone who is a US citizen, please write your Senators and House representatives pushing back against the chaos and the proposed science cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and the future of science in the US needs every bit of help it can get right now.

Google owes far more to TCP/IP research from DARPA than that particular library grant. But even then, the meta point is that you need lots of research pushing forward all edges of knowledge.

It is very rare that any single grant can result in a massive successful business at this point. Pushing computing forward needs constant research in all directions to push forward hardware, networks, security, power conservation/generation, algorithms, storage, etc, etc.

If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.

This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.

Not much to say. If anyone is truly on the fence, please remember this and vote against it in 2026. Vote early, vote often. Vote local. I promise that killing trans people and defunding science is not going to make gas cheaper or anything.

Except it's gambling with an entire nation's fortune, instead of likes/votes/reactions.

Trump and Musk style themselves after Alexander. They see the complexities of geopolitics, security, culture and economics, and they have contempt for that complexity. They give simple, brutal solutions for hard problems: War in Europe? Force Ukraine to surrender! Slow to change government policy? Fire Federal workers and consolidate power! Too many illegal immigrants? Send them to Guantamo! And it feels active, it feels efficient, it's cathartic, and so their base cheers them on as they take swings at the load-bearing walls of our country. The fulminant narcissism, impulsive mania and willful ignorance are adaptive, to them.

That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.

It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/hiv-usaid-freeze-...

The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.

The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.

Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.

In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.

It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.

These people also can't afford AIDS medications.

This is just one of many examples.

Your standard given here already isn't being held to in the most basic, obvious ways.

It’s gone. People are dying because it’s gone.

Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?

These government programs aren't stray servers in a closet.

Even if you believe that these programs should be stopped, it's entirely wasteful to abruptly end them and let their work in progress just crash out and burn.

But it's still a very bad idea to operate this way. There is no rapid feedback loop. The negative effects can be subtle and take years to ripple through the economy and science world.

This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.

Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.

  “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C." - Governor Bobby Jindal, Feb 24 2009 in his party response to Obama first address to congress.  


  “Monitor my Beer” - Mount Redoubt in Alaska, March 22, 2009, erupted.  

I always end up thinking about this when republicans pick stupid examples of government waste. Best of luck to you.

And your trite inclusion of “orange man” to every post as a method to diminish the op argument betrays your clear bias.

You might as well starve prisoners and then say sensible calorie management is not in and of itself foolish.

I, personally, believe that much of the current financial structure of the universities is broken, and the structure of the “indirect costs” causes strongly misaligned incentives, but arbitrarily and massively lowering the rates on zero notice is not the solution. I’ll note that no one involve in DOGE seems to have an actual proposal to improve the situation — they just seem to want to shut everything off.

Why would they do that when stock buybacks are more profitable for shareholders?

[edit: Found a less condescending way to make my point.]

This is after all the same reasoning used to give tax breaks to get a factory to setup in town

Edit: Too much time on screen today. My apologies for muddying the waters!

Trump will be gone in a few years, one way or the other. However, the foundations that are being poured for legitimizing a strongman, authoritarian role for the executive and almost eliminating the role of the other two branches is deeply dangerous.

If you believe the goals are worthy enough that the ends justify the means, think of the worst president ever(in your opinion) and consider whether you'd want them to have the same power? Because politicians never let power go willingly. They will certainly point to Trump's precedent as a means of legitimizing their actions.

My fervent hope is that our institutions are strong enough to weather this assault and that enough people make it clear to the administration that there are lines they are not willing to cross. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

The reason, I think, is that a kind of social compact died. Powerful corporate interests neglected much of the American population, which bred resentment and anger now harnessed by Trump, Musk, et al.

I don’t see a fix, I’m not even sure it can be fixed. It took decades to offshore so much of the American economy, but I don’t think anyone will be given decades to fix it.

I wonder how history will judge the American era.

Competition doesn't matter to a xenophobe. That's what the tariffs are for. You admit that you can't compete, so you make it too expensive for people to buy the foreign things, forcing them to buy your (inferior/expensive) things, with the upside-down belief that that will make your economy strong. When actually the now-captive market is an incentive to make things worse and more expensive. You'd think the people who "beat communism with choice and competition" would get that.

I do hope that the program will continue with new leadership - some PAWR contracts are still active, and some platforms, including ours[2] have funding outside of PAWR. But the loss of institutional knowledge will seriously hurt these programs, and is definitely not "efficient"

[1] https://advancedwireless.org/ [2] https://www.powderwireless.net/

"""

In a more elegant world, Mastodon/Fediverse would have the concept of topics, and I'd be able to follow `@[email protected]` without following @[email protected]`, but we're not in that elegant world. Mastodon (nor Pleroma, nor Pixelfed, nor any of the other Fediverse software) doesn't offer anything like that, short of multiple accounts, which comes with other big problems.

> don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is

..

> In a more elegant world [..] the concept of topics, and I'd be able to follow [..]

One can dream. I used to regard the idea of filter bubbles as a negative thing, but I'd be perfectly content with being able to craft my own right about now.

As Technology Connections recently said, it's worrying that people have had hostile bubbles built around them and not noticed.

If you happen to be one of those people who thought that voting for the Republicans was in your best interest, yet you are shocked and horrified by what the Republicans are currently doing, I strongly suggest you reevaluate your political epistemology, and interrogate both your sources of information as well as your political stances.

Unlike you, others fully expected this as the outcome Of a Republican Administration and Congress.

The slash and burn is not the best, but it's better than dying of starvation. Similarly here, dumping billions and trillions, and billions more, and they cannot even implement Login.gov after being told by Congress. So, unfortunately, fire them all. The feamongering wants people to believe "hydroponics or death", but no, slash and burn at this point. One of the biggest reasons to move quickly is to get ahead of the really, really bad leftist propaganda system, to exploit the news cycle.

Same goes for the billions propping up the world, from research to civilian aid. Whatever we lose, the rest of the world loses more. I would like to see the rest of the first world do something significant, like fill the void, like Europe. But let's not kid ourselves, Russian artillery is going to make their social spending very burdensome.

Even if America stops literally everything, I think we'd still end up supplying more blankets to Ukraine than the rest of Europe combined. Anyone who says Germany or China is going to be more popular needs to put down the Kool-Aid.

Can't wait! That's going to an awful lot of Kool-Aid though to believe that. I recommend sticking to state TV on China's popularity in any given country.

> It has struck major deals for access to natural resources, and boosted its influence significantly primarily through infrastructure loans.

Yeah, maybe we should have given them loans instead of aid. That would've increased our popularity to China-levels for sure. The part about natural resources will also make them popular. Lol. At least we're punking out Europeans for their natural resources instead of Africa.

> take down US's dominance on the world scene

That's illusory. There is no soft power without hard power, and we have it all, and will likely continue for the next four years. We will continue to do what we want, as before.

> They will be in for a rude awakening.

Nothing you've said really affects the US domestic situation negatively. We can get into the price of eggs and tariffs, sure, but.. We're still going to dominate. (Not high-fiving the US, but dissing the world.)

One of the few falsifiable statements you made is absolutely, completely, objectively false.

Again, consider that perhaps your epistemology is broken.

You are free to explore their audited financials, as well as their IRS 990 form, which indicates all revenue, expenses as well as top 10 salaried employees.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

Regarding the source of the falsehood you believed to be true, there are only two potential explanations:

One, they intentionally deceived you, or two, they have no idea what they are talking about and should not be relied upon for truthful information.

That this particular false belief was so strong, and so core to your political stances, that you used it as the foundation for your argument as to why the current republican administration is acting in the best interests of the nation, I would hope that this would cause you to reconsider the rest of your stances as well as more carefully scrutinize your sources of information for veracity.

In short, please consider the possibility that your epistemology may be broken.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

The process and detail you’re asking for would be the responsible way to shrink the government and is the polar opposite of what’s happening.

And yes, they’re entirely common.. as one example the Air Force did a big one of its civilian staff during the Obama era. The military does them all the time for their base closures and realignments. Tens of thousands of staff were let go during that process.

The whole idea behind the layoffs is a belief that the feds are wildly overstaffed, with tons of easy obvious staff cuts to make. That was never the reality, and now we’re all about to learn that the hard way.

Your reasons aren’t a good justification for what they did, because they’re breaking the rules anyway.

You could have answered your own questions (to some degree) in half the time it required to make the comment. Even if you didn't take the time, we have enough priors to make a judgment.

Your comment just feels like sealioning.

Thanks for taking the time to insult me.

The easiest way to know your thinking might be sensible is if you get mobbed, flagged and personally attacked.

Moderators should have a way to prevent this but, having run online groups myself, I know how hard it is. Maybe one day AI will be used to --hopefully-- bring reason to online conversations.

If you want to cut the federal deficit, we need to restore tax rates to the level they were at around the turn of the century - rich people were fine back then, nobody gave up because their yacht only had a small helicopter – and reduce spending on the big areas which are the only ones where it’s mathematically possible for cuts to make a significant difference.

For example, NSF’s budget is 1/15 of the Republicans’ proposed INCREASE in DoD funding. Even if we destroy U.S. science funding entirely and cede the global leadership role to China, we will end up behind of where we were last year even before the tax cuts add orders of magnitude more debt. That’s even before you factor in how much money the economy has lost from all of the work the government supports and how many businesses rely on government research and funding.

Similarly, if you wanted to save a lot more money, you’d be working to make U.S. healthcare as efficient as government programs. Instead, Republicans blocked Medicaid from negotiating drug prices and shut down attempts to limit drug profit margins, which means there are individual drugs where the annual extra profit compared to pricing in Canada is greater than the entire NSF budget.

> The Senate on Friday forged ahead with plans to give the military an additional $150 billion in spending even as the Pentagon seeks to make sweeping changes and reductions in its budget. Senators voted 52-48 in favor of a budget resolution that will unlock $340 billion in spending for U.S.-Mexico border security, energy independence, Coast Guard modernization and military investments while mandating cuts elsewhere.

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-02-21/senate-milita...

Worrying about small amounts of M while increasing other parts with B makes me wonder how it could be perceived that there's any actual interest in a "balanced budget." The only president to balance the budget was Clinton, and it was an economically terrible idea.

Government budgets are not like a company's budget or a family's budget, and pretending that it is, when we control the reserve currency of the world, is just plain silly and weak.

So this is hundreds of billions per year, and 4 trillion in total effect on the debt.

What we call "national debt" is just additional money supply. Instead of dollars they are bonds, that let us retroactively control the amount of them by merely changing interests rates at the Fed. Which is why they are superior to printing a ton of dollars and spending them directly.

When the world needs additional money supply, and they preferentially choose to use money denominated in dollars, that means that our economy wins out. If we are not deficit spending then we are likely leaving economic gains on the table.

Additionally, most "fixed incomes" these days are inflation pegged, so even inflation is not a burden. But it's never a tax.

But since you put it so starkly, it must be pointed out that when we do not deficit spend when we could, it is to the detriment of productive members of society that are producing all the things that those on fixed incomes need.

But yes I do think it is very wasteful, as the article says it can cause serious inflation issues to dump $1T into the economy like that. Not at all economically conservative nor a useful behaviour of an agency claiming to want to save money, similar to the federal firings I critiqued as non-productive in the other thread you followed me from.

The common two reference point for "good" ways to reduce the deficit is 1) spend less on defense. 2) change taxes (either raise on corporations, wealthy or close loopholes).

2 being basically impossible to move. 1 seems easier, but I know nothing of this space. Others include stronger healthcare reform, etc etc.

I hear a lot about the debt going up. Not once have I ever heard what the consequences of this debt are to the regular tax payer. None of these cuts are going to give normal people significant tax cuts, and cutting all these programs certainly doesn't seem like it'll positively impact people's lives. Research investment more than pays people back not just in terms of money, but quality of life. Same goes for general maintenance.

The sudden nature of these consequences without many real world impacts beforehand also happens at an individual level. It might be tempting to take on credit card debt at the moment and there might not be any real world consequences to running up the balance but if painful measures are not taken to address the situation before a moment of crisis (i.e. inability to service the debt), you are in for a world of pain.

My god...this is such a common misunderstanding, they should use a different word already...

The US is currently defaulting on all sorts of debts, and the deficit has nothing to do with it. I wonder why its credit rating hasn’t been slashed yet.

As I think you are hinting at, the US is in the process of cancelling many contracts deemed no longer in the interest of the country under a new administration. Contracts can represent a form of obligation similar to debt and there are many companies who will not sign contracts with the government due to the complications involved (or who will request very favorable terms). Unfortunately, there is not really a good rating mechanism (at least that I am aware of) for rating entities that is risky to enter into a contractional relationship with - this stuff is often passed around via word of mouth.

Inflation, and systemic fragility.

The second part is esoteric but extremely important. In financial systems, you often find that risk clusters in gray areas where models are incomplete or where the cost doesn't show up as a line item on a report. For example, increasing the bank leverage ratios to tamp down long term yields (some talk of this possibly happening that I've seen in the trading space), swaps the cost of higher interest rates for banking fragility. Risk cannot be erased, just transformed.

When it comes to debt, the Federal Reserve balance sheet spiked from 4 trillion to 8 trillion during 2020, which was in and of itself a result of earlier systemic fragility (bond leverage/basis trade collapse, which is essentially the link between the directly FED controlled ecosystem and the even more massive modern global dollar system). That balance sheet expansion seemingly had no "cost", due to interest rates being zero, but when looked at with a wider lens, the Fed essentially had massive amounts of convex interest rate risk on its books. When inflation did wake up (in large part due to the sharp fiscal infusion), their response function is to raise rates, but that functions as an immediate devaluation of their book which in part functions as a large wealth transfer to the private sector (which includes many things like mortgage holders, to the embedded inflation in long term options which the trading account I was managing got for essentially free). The net result was inflation that ran away, a borderline housing bubble where a generation is priced out, and of course a massive spike in inequality. With higher rates, Reverse Repo was also paying hundreds of billions in interest, directly fighting the inflation reducing effort.

The previous regime looked good on paper - yields were low, inflation was low, etc, but essentially what was happening was an overheating system that didn't fully factor in the costs of QE. Naturally, the costs are eventually realized. But it's insidious when these effects are, as I said, things like increasing wealth inequality that won't show up on a balance sheet report on WSJ. Risk clusters in gray areas.

So the situation now is that the treasury has shifted most of the issuance to the short end, Which means that there is a concentration of risk that starts to accelerate if inflation starts to tick up again. Because all of the T-bills get rolled every six months to two years. Before too long the debt is going to have to be termed back out to the long end, but at that point you're going to see some serious issues absorbing all of the issuance. That line raises the risk of a liquidity crisis and a breakdown of the repo market, which is a financial crisis. Alternatively, the debt can be once again stuffed in the central bank balance sheet, but it's unlikely that that regime is going to come back in full force because the costs of doing so are now extremely apparent and humans have recency bias. If the options become too constrained, the net result would be a Bank of Japan style situation, where a major currency devaluation is the only realistic scenario.

So as for the costs, it's not something that's ever going to be immediately seen, unless something's going wrong. You will probably see a mix of all of the above. Bank regulations loosened so they can take on more risk. Central Bank reversing balance sheet runoff. Some slow grinding currency devaluation. And a slew of creative financial repression (lower long term bond yield) initiatives.

Zooming way back out, it's just not an ideal or efficient way to run the system, to have these slow rolling crisis waves reverberating through time. Billions dollar pet startups levered against the QE regime was not efficient allocation of resources. Negative cost leverage for private equity is not ideal for an egalitarian society. Etc. Of course there are the more obvious examples, like sharp inflation shock risk, and budget constraints as interest payments rise, but my point is that the costs are there. All around you. You just don't see them.

That's one aspect of retirement systems that has always concerned me. Sure, it's neat to give people the control over retirement that comes with investing in an open market. But contrast this to public retirement systems where you pay in and the money is used to pay out retirement (of other people) immediately. Ultimately, both systems have to be sustained by a real economy that can provide the goods and services that folks require during retirement. But one of them puts a large amount of assets into the hands of unelected money managers, which is surely a potential source of instability.

If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.

To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...

Financial conditions tightened after 2008, despite QE. The money supply in the broader sense (global liquidity) tightened significantly because of banking regulations limiting balance sheet size, and because of collateral requirements massively tightening up. No more sending CMBS into repo to originate systemic leverage - it's treasuries or nothing. Repo within the US is about 5 trillion today, and probably about 20 trillion globally (with USD assets at the core of the chain), so the 2008 style collateral crisis was massively deflationary despite the various liquidity injections.

There is also a cost for the QE activity - the central bank takes on interest rate risk, essentially putting on a giant prop trade on short-term interest rates (and the results of such an unwind were seen post 2020, especially in areas like the housing price surge and the banking collapse).

QE is not money printing though. It's a misconception. In some ways it can tighten. It takes high quality collateral out of the system and exchanges it for bank reserves which are extremely limited. As the QE "money printing" got obscene, banks had massive amounts of excess reserves and further reserve accumulation from QE was not an injection of liquidity at all. It really had almost no effect. If you remember, trillions of dollars of reserves were parked back at the Fed in Reverse Repo, and when inflation forced interest rates up, the inflationary loop was accelerated by the interest on reserves - the risk never goes away, it transforms and slashes around. In the '10s though, there was arguably collateral scarcity from QE, and indeed it is undeniable that a giant bond bubble was built up with 0% (negative in Europe) long term debt. Meanwhile leverage was zero cost or even negative real cost, which showed up in massive asset inflation (bank reserves from QE mostly don't propagate to the real economy. Even bank lending post 2008 has little to do with reserves.)

It takes a few years to kick in, which is why we saw it under biden.

Not saying that is what will happen here, but this is the first thing I associate in my mind when I hear of some "decisive" leader trying to pay the country's debts.

Sure, it resulted in a baby boom, but it also ended up creating those infamous orphanages full of neglected children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

Everyone who made billions off the internet is too busy smelling their own farts to recognize that none of this waves hand in the general direction of basically all modern technology would exist without the sustained government funding that built ARPAnet and NSFNET.

They absolutely understand that. They also see money/power as a finite resource and absolutely do not want any new competition to emerge via anything that could be created or funded by anything they do not control.

Some of them do realize the actual situation and are ladder pulling, but mixed in with that there's also a pervasive offshoot of hyper narcissistic survivorship bias that in my experience a lot of modern tech entrepreneurs suffer from where they really are actually shockingly blind to the build-up of everything that they then built on.

Like the Internet existing for them is taken as just a given like the earth and the seas being here, but "taxi cabs you hail through the internet"... that's the real invention!

People are so used to excessive waste they can’t even tell it apart from something that adds value.

The Telcos would allocate funding / resources based on their financial position and their needs.

I dunno, tbh maybe the government can do a better job at right-sizing the service and running it efficiently than the private sector could? Maybe! But it feels like most arguments along these lines would also apply to the Telcos themselves, i.e, if government can do a better job why not nationalise the Telcos?

This will raise prices

It is risky in that the work is open-ended and “wins” are hard to predict. But when they are found, they benefit everyone. And then industry can swing into action commercializing it.

Look at the republican budget. They’re adding $85B a year for better border security; half of which is to deploy the US military inside the US. The other half goes to the national guard and customs and border patrol. So, for every dollar they cut from the NSF, they’re spending $10 to deploy troops against American civilians.

For every one of those dollars, they’re handing $10 out in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.

This is being paid for by cutting medicare, which we will all rely on, assuming we somehow manage to live through the inevitable pandemics, natural disasters, economic collapse and wars this jackass is going to start.

Is just something assumed by Republicans with no basis in reality. The amount of "facts" that conservative friends post on Facebook that can be trivially debunked that have still been circulating for years is insane.

I'm from Europe and the current US politics discourages me from buying US products. I guess this will push a new Europe first movement on this side of the globe. Not the scenario I wished for because I quite liked the more open system.

Do you think there was consent to have a guy who wasn’t on the ballot do things which the guy who was on the ballot said he wouldn’t do, with zero involvement or consent from the people’s representatives?

The outcome of this is not going to be a smaller government that achieves 80% of its previous goals with 70% of the spending. The outcome of this is going to be massively chaotic organizations and less efficiency because of the huge fucking wrecking balls slammed into everything by people that have publicly spoken about their goal to destroy the post-new-deal society and replace it with CEO-kings running fiefdoms.

“People are bad, therefore let’s throw organizations of even more people at the problem” doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

In fact, not only does this “solution” not solve the problem, it creates a whole host of new ones: corruption, graft, human rights abuses, and perpetuation of the status quo due to codification.

Using taxes to fund basic research is one of many ways our institutions have a countervailing effect towards long-term thinking. In fact we should be taxing much more and doing much, much more of it.

This is explicitly anti-majoritarian, yes.

Corruption is indeed a potential issue, and we should focus on ways to e.g. root out peer review rings. But the numbers we're talking about are tiny.

Your argument is the classic Randist Libertarian one: "There is no such thing as society, everything I did I earned myself with no reference to anyone." It is, of course, complete and utter garbage. Government spending is the only known way of constructing projects that are not attractive money-makers: rural electrification, communications systems, roads, water treatment, education. In order to keep currency flowing, governments remove it from circulation via taxation.

Coercion is necessary for governance and you wouldn't want to live in a world without it. The Thief who steals money with a knife doesn't consent to jail time. If the government doesn't levy taxes to pay for policing, then there is no way to punish the theif for violation of the victims consent.

Your unthought out opinion is a position of privilege, not one of reason or sanity.

That doesn't even broach the topic of a child being born into poverty or slavery.

Without a military force, funded by taxes, to defend against neighboring slavers your notion of consent doesn't matter in the first place. That's the fundamental contradiction of anarchy.

Also, the money they are taking is produced by and guaranteed by the US government. Is it really "your" money? Without the US government that money is worthless.

instead, now that value is being taken away from me without consent, and im goinf to be forced to spend more somewhere else in my life to make up for it, without the actual consent of it going through votes and discussion in congress

If you really want to reduce government subsidies, start with the defense industry, which is fully funded by your tax dollars. And it really accomplishes very little for the country, other than the scientific research it funds (which is actually substantial and which often results in breakthroughs with non-military applications).

The current population had no say whatsoever in these laws. They were born into it like being born into slavery.

There is no “unsubscribe”.

Bro... I think you missed the civics class where they explain how economies/governments work.

tl;dr the magical free market isn't, the world is complicated, and governments are supposed to help their people, which includes providing things, like money, to do things, like advance the state of the civilization, its people, its businesses, products, services, technologies, defenses, education, health, food, energy, etc etc etc etc etc

> Why is everyone acting like the sky is falling when an elected official does the things people voted for them to do?

Two words: National Socialism. Sometimes the people are morons, and the leaders psychopaths.