Quotulatiousness

March 21, 2025

Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:

It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.

Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.

This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:

“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?

[…]

Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.

Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.

On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?

March 13, 2025

This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:

Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.

“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”

Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?

Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.

I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.

There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.

March 3, 2025

Is DOGE merely uncovering what used to be called “honest” graft?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore explains where the expression “honest graft” came from and gives examples of what the DOGE investigations have turned up so far:

In 1905, George Washington Plunkitt made arguably the most famous defense of political graft in American history.

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft,” the New York state senator and Tammany Hall member wrote, “but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft”.

Plunkitt was responding to The Shame of the Cities, a book by journalist Lincoln Steffens that exposed sweeping political corruption in U.S. cities.

The ward boss’s shameless defense of “honest graft”, which is still assigned to undergraduates a century after Plunkitt’s death, comes to mind when looking at the fraud, waste, and abuse Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others are uncovering.

To take but one example, consider the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds the Environmental Protection Agency awarded last year to Power Forward Communities. If you’ve never heard of the nonprofit group, you’re forgiven. Almost nobody has — because it didn’t exist until late 2023.

Power Forward Communities had no footprint, online or otherwise, until October 2023, when it was announced as part of the Rewiring America program, an organization linked to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which says its mission is “all about Rewiring America’s values, people, and culture.”

Less than a year after its creation, Power Forward Communities was awarded $2 billion via the EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund — even though it reported just $100 in revenue during its first three months of operation.

The payment, which is slated to continue through June 2031, caught the attention of Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” Zeldin said.

Indeed. It’s graft on a scale the Tammany Hall charlatans couldn’t have imagined.

Historical sources say 19th-century politician Boss Tweed and his ring of cronies took in at least $50 million in corrupt money in backroom deals, kickbacks, and skimming before Tweed was convicted of larceny and forgery in 1873 and fled to Cuba, and later Spain. In 2025 dollars, that’s about $1.3 billion — considerably less than the single payoff former President Joe Biden’s EPA awarded Power Forward Communities.

February 26, 2025

The more DOGE uncovers, the more we see that western governments are really vast graft machines

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson discusses the ramifications of all the wasted money uncovered by DOGE in the first month of investigations and what it almost certainly confirms about the actual value taxpayers are getting for their money:

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.

But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.

The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.

This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.

Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.

Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?

And meanwhile this:

Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.

Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.

No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.

Update: Fixed broken link.

February 25, 2025

Likely trajectories of the victims of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bruce Ivar Godmundsson identifies the most probably career dislocations of civil servants winkled out of their expected life sinecures by the minions of Elon:

To put things another way, the status deprivation experienced by erstwhile feeders at the Federal trough will eventually lead to a great deal of radicalization. After all, if history is any guide, it is not the victims of sustained oppression who raise the banner of revolt, but those who lost advantages that they had earlier expected to enjoy for the rest of their days. (It was not, after all, agricultural laborers, let alone vagabonds, who enlisted in the machine-smashing armies of General Ludd, but practitioners of “decent trades” who had previously occupied lucrative bottlenecks in supply chains.)

As they LARP as extras in the street fighting scene of Les Misérables, the outcasts will find, standing beside them on the barricades, youngsters who, as recently as the autumn of 2024, had expected to parley their ability to paraphrase (or, at the very least, parrot) the Party Line into an internship with an agency, a poorly paid (but prestigious) place in an NGO, or, for those especially adept at symbolic manipulation, a job with a name-brand consulting firm.

Leaving aside the cinematic metaphors, some of the dispossessed will, no doubt, resort to rioting. More will ride the protest circuit, which will do for them what comic-book conventions do for fancy-dressed fans of manga and anime. Most, however, will do little more than haunt the margins of the middle class, muttering about their masters degrees in public policy as they wait for the next command to appear on the screens above their grills.

Repeated encounters with the fallen may drive the final nail into the coffin of the assumption, once central to the world view of so many Americans, that possession of a sheepskin entitled its holder to a desk job. No longer will parents dining at McDonalds whisper to their children “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like that”. Rather, they will point to the technician repairing a self-service kiosk and say “that’s the sort of thing that you want to do”.

February 17, 2025

A maple-flavoured DOGE? Maxime Bernier proposed this in 2020

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s both amusing and alarming seeing the kind of things the US government has been pouring money into, as the young auditors of Elon Musk’s DOGE dig into the accounts. Some folks on social media have been asking for a Canadian version of DOGE, but they’re nearly five years behind PPC leader Maxime Bernier:

Did you know that the Canadian government is spending $143,000 to help the African country of Senegal implement a “sectorial gender strategy” in its armed forces?

Or $46,793 to improve healthcare for intersex people in the Chinese province of Shandong?

What about $4.6 million to develop programs promoting a “positive masculinity” in Cuba?

There are hundreds of such crazy programs costing Canadian taxpayers billions of dollars every year to fund the Liberals’ woke ideology in other countries.

Many people on social media just found out that these programs exist last week, after they started looking for them on the website of the Government of Canada.

They were inspired by similar crazy programs that Elon Musk has unearthed with his DOGE team in Washington.

The DOGE – or Department of Government Efficiency – was created by President Trump and has already cut tens of billions of dollars in frivolous spending after only a few weeks.

I’m being asked if I support having the equivalent of a DOGE in Canada.

Not only do I support it, but I didn’t wait for Trump and Musk to do it to propose one. I did years ago!

In 2020, I stated that a PPC government would have a Minister of Government Downsizing to examine every federal program and cut or abolish everything that is inefficient, wasteful or not essential.

And speaking of DOGE, Coyote Blog shares some thoughts about some of the reasons Democrats are critical of the organization’s efforts:

… having thought about this longer, I think this is about more than just money. It is also about class. Just listen to how the cool kids in the media talk about Musk’s group of young weirdly-nicknamed geeks. This is fairly typical:

    He was speaking specifically about a Trump executive order that decrees that the Department for Government Efficiency can force federal agencies into firing four people for every new hire. “Who the hell voted for Mr. Musk?” Begala raged. “Who the hell voted for — excuse the phrase — a guy who calls himself Big Balls? A 19-year-old kid going in there and trying to fire cancer researchers and scientists and teachers and agricultural specialists. It’s, it’s appalling.”

This is moderately hilarious from a) a party who still has not told us which unelected people really were making decisions behind the curtain for a senile Joe Biden; and b) an individual (Begala) who wielded immense power and influence across all departments of the Clinton Administration. The department staffs in DC are 99.99% people who are both unelected and unconfirmed by Congress. The issue is not that they are unelected, the issue is that they are “the wrong sort”. I am reminded of the British aristocracy in the 19th century that would tolerate almost any sort of governmental incompetence or malfeasance as long as the people were “the right sort” — meaning of their class.

The mention of Victorian England reminds me of another way that class is likely involved here. In the English aristocracy the oldest son inherited the title and often all the land and income (which was entailed to the title). This left little for any additional sons, so an income had to be found somewhere for them in a profession that did not require them to sully themselves with “trade” (daughters were handled a different way, through the marriage market). Reading for the law was an acceptable profession for a son with brains, and the army or navy were outlets for many. But most families needed a way for their sons without too much brains or ability and not militarily inclined to make a living. A position in the Church was often the solution.

Modern American blue-blood parents are no different — they need a way to secure a living for their kids who won’t or can’t land a job in the modern elite career choices (law, consulting, investment banking, or a sexy startup). Unlike in Victorian times, the military or the Church are no longer preferred elite options. So what to do with your 22-year-old gender studies major? The parents need her to get an income and they need her to do it in a context that they can proudly report to their friends — Paul Begala does not want to tell his friends that his son’s job is maintaining distributor pricing lists (anyone who does not believe the latter criteria should have been at my Princeton or Harvard Business School 25th reunions).

The solution? Get them a job at a non-profit, the modern American version of going to the Church. As Arnold Kling noted once, non-profits tend to have much higher status than do for-profits. And without competition they don’t have to carry the same performance standards as for-profits. And they are incredibly susceptible to trading a position for your kid in exchange for a nice donation.

The employment rosters of non-profits and NGO’s are stuffed with the children of privilege. So much so that there are many non-profits that seem to do nothing EXCEPT employ and pay the travel expenses of 20-something kids from rich and/or influential families. I have been writing about the non-profit scam for years. As I wrote then:

    From my direct experience, I would go further. There is a tranche (I don’t know how large) of non-profits that are close to outright scams, providing most of their benefits to their managers and employees rather to anyone outside the organization. These benefits include 1) a salary with few performance expectations; 2) expense-paid parties and travel; 3) myriad virtue-signalling opportunities; 4) opportunities to build personal networks. This isn’t just criticizing theoretical institutions — people I know are in such jobs in these organizations.

The spending that DOGE is going after at USAID and other departments likely threatens the income of a number of under-qualified elite kids. So I will update my meme:

February 11, 2025

“As it turns out, you can just cut things”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carter outlines the left’s long march through the institutions and explains why a conservative counter-operation of the same kind would utterly fail. Instead, Donald Trump (of all people) launched a political blitzkrieg that used none of the strategies of the long march — because the establishment knew intimately how those worked, as they’d used them for generations to become the establishment:

Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot
Fedele Fischetti, 18th century.

But a counter-revolutionary long march through the institutions was always a doomed project.

The left understands the method quite well, having perfected it themselves, and its defences against counter-infiltration were well advanced. It was never enough merely to say the right things, and not say the wrong things – the left knows how easily such signals are faked, as these are mere words, and words have no meaning to an egregore which sees in discourse nothing but the currents and tokens of power. Much of the seeming insanity of the Cancelled Years is best understood as the imposition of elaborate, difficult to fake displays of loyalty: offering your child’s genitals to the hungry gender gorgon, opening your veins for the gene therapy injection. Then of course there is DEI, whose explicit intent was to simply deny opportunity to those most likely, on a demographic basis, to oppose the left. There is very little point, as a young white man, in keeping your mouth shut if you will be locked out simply because you are white, no matter what you say.

The psychological demands of stealthy infiltration are spiritually toxic. Anyone attempting this path finds himself embedded in a social context in which all of his friends and colleagues adhere to values which he privately despises, and moreover, he knows that the instant they discover his true beliefs he will be not only fired, but ostracized and isolated. Worse, he’s constantly placed in the position of betraying his own convictions, of going along with and even actively supporting things he knows are wrong, because failing to do so would be immediately suspicious. Since the left is a hive mind, he must “pretend” to give up his agency … and insofar as you are what you do, there is very little difference between pretending to give up your agency, and actually doing giving it up. Living like this is miserable. It requires iron discipline, and there is very little reward. Some of you doubtless have direct experience of this.

The most important reason that a long march was never viable, however, was that there was not enough time.

The West is in crisis. Public debt has broken up through the exosphere, its rise ever more vertical as the deficits fuelling it continue to expand, and we can all see in its meteoric rise that its inevitable descent will hit the land like rods from God. Third world invaders pour into our countries by their millions at the open invitation of seditious governments whose open aim is to reduce native white populations to second-class minorities in their own homelands within the space of a generation. These two crises of the Great Inflation and the Great Replacement could never be solved by the tactics the left used to bring them about. Even if such a long march could have succeeded in the face of the barriers the left so astutely erected, by the time it came to fruition the victors would preside over wreckage.

The left’s tactics were those of a chronic disease, gradually wasting the patient, leaching the strength from his limbs. You cannot cure a patient by becoming an opportunistic infection in your own right.

So what to do? Many, despairing, looked to civil war. A coup d’état, likely followed by blue states separating from the Union. Battle lines would be drawn, brother would be set against brother, cities would be ruined, vast pits would be excavated and filled with the stinking dead. Such a war would never have been limited to continental United States. It would have dissolved the Pax Americana, with brushfire wars springing up across the globe as great powers sought to expand their territories by grabbing resources or strategic trade corridors. Those powers would have gotten involved in the Civil War themselves, backing one side or another, prolonging the conflict in order to ensure the Union remained shattered forever.

On J6, the American government teetered on a precipice. Had Trump applied so much as the gentlest pressure with his baby finger, it would have toppled over. The other side would then have screamed that he was a tyrant who had seized power by force; his own supporters would have rallied to the cause that the election had been stolen; America, and the world, would have been bathed in blood. So Trump pulled back, allowed the heroes of J6 to be imprisoned, and permitted the sclerocracy to impose four years of malevolent mismanagement on the American people.

Many were furious with Trump. He’d lost his nerve; he was a coward.

As it turned out, they were all wrong. It was a strategic withdrawal.

And now, instead of a Long March, we are getting a blitzkrieg.

I’ve been silent for the last month partly for personal reasons that deprived me of the time and energy to write, which I won’t elaborate upon here save to note that it’s nothing anyone has to worry about. But I’ve also been silent because I haven’t been sure what to say. The last weeks have been one of those ‘weeks when decades happen’ periods, and that pace of change doesn’t appear to be letting up. Executive Orders flying off of the big man’s desk, birthright citizenship being struck down, entire government departments getting defunded, the J6 heroes being pardoned, trade wars starting and then stopping before they start, the military heading to the border, DOGE siccing broccoli-headed zoomers armed with large language models to rip through the sprawling financial records of acronym agencies like a cyclone of destruction.

As it turns out, you can just cut things.

These are all great, wonderful things. We are winning, and the pace of winning is dizzying. It’s like we’ve spent the last several years slamming again and again against a seemingly immovable wall, bashing our brains out upon it like an enraged tiger, only for that wall to suddenly turn to sand upon our final desperate push, leaving us sprawled and disoriented on the ground.

That is at least what it has felt like to me. The people on the inside of the Trump administration are not disoriented. Far from it. They are executing a detailed, thorough plan. They’ve identified the enemy nerve centres and are neutralizing them precisely, rapidly, and ruthlessly. Handpicked squads of very competent young men have been turned loose inside the Beltway. It is clear that they are not being micromanaged, but are being left to develop their own action plans on the fly as the tactical situation evolves. This is manoeuvre warfare, with small, nimble, lethal teams dropped into the heart of enemy territory and being given maximum latitude to pursue the campaign’s strategic objectives.

February 7, 2025

USAID still very much in the news

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pretty much any libertarian can quote chapter and verse of how governments waste taxpayer money, but even the most doctrinaire libertarian must be boggled at the extent of waste and corruption enabled by the use of the cover organization USAID. And it’s only one federal agency! We may never be able to get a proper accounting, but it seems that a vast share of US tax revenue has been going to things never dreamed of by the framers of the Constitution or even by the legislators that set up all these various agencies.

On MeWe, Marc Adkins shared a post from a friend, discussing the USAID mess:

One of the dangers President Trump, Elon and DOGE face is that there is just so much crazy, bad, virtually unbelievable news coming out of USAID, the sheer volume [de-]sensitizes people to it.

I must admit, I’m beginning to be overwhelmed by the bad news. One begins to feel a sense of futility, especially when you have been paying taxes your entire life — for me, I have paid taxes since I was sixteen (on my part time jobs and gig jobs through high school and college) — that’s 50 years, and while what I have paid is extremely small compared to the USAID budget, it is simple math to calculate that everything I have ever paid, as well as everything many of us have ever paid has been flushed down the toilet. That is a tough thing to take.

And this has been going on since USAID was created by JFK’s executive order in 1961.

One of the hardest things to swallow in recent years is discovering that your tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist friends may have been closer to the truth all this time. I mean, yeah, we all knew that the government wasted money as if that was their main job, but all the whacko theories about the CIA destabilizing hostile (and friendly) foreign governments (Ngô Đình Diệm waves hello), humanitarian projects being covers for espionage, all kinds of secret squirrel nonsense all over the globe … may have been far closer to the truth than what CBS, The New York Times, or PBS had to say about them. So instead of being the calm, rational people we thought ourselves to be, we’ve been the chumps for all these years. That will leave a mark.

I don’t think it is a leap too far to say that in some way, each one of us has paid for the enrichment of a vast array of US Senators, Representatives, cabinet members, agency heads and even vice presidents and presidents, as well as funding terrorists and brutal dictators worldwide. Hell, it appears we are paying lower level government employees double because the same people are drawing two paychecks!

Then there are the billions that are being automatically paid, flowing like a river to unknown entities, criminals, fraudsters, and into the accounts of programs, the authorization of which expired years and decades ago.

It is almost too much to take in, especially when, in the face of such obvious money laundering, payola, mismanagement and waste, Democrats hit the streets to protest the people uncovering all of it rather than screaming about the criminal waste and let’s not kid ourselves, this scandal is a left wing Democrat thing, they absolutely own it because this money is flowing to left wing NGOs, media and other organizations — I daresay there is a significant slice of the pie that winds up in Democrat coffers at the end of the process.

The memes are almost always on point:

The simple fact is they do not give two shits about the taxpayer working his ass off just have his entire life’s sum of his taxes from his career of working ten hours a day in the blistering sun and freezing cold just to pay his share of a USAID program for transing handicapped children in Botswana.

It is shameless, of course, but something we have come to expect from Democrats and every single Democrat who protests this should be run out of office and never allowed near government again — ever.

The problem isn’t really Democrats or even RINOs … it’s the seductive nature of political office, and the US government is the biggest, richest, most pervasive government that has ever existed. No matter how pure and noble your aims may be, prolonged contact with the vast resources of the US government and the ability to direct the efforts of that government toward your goals will overpower the scruples of the most honest of men. [Insert Elrond and Isildur “cast it into the fire” meme here.] This is, I think, why DOGE is so disruptive: it has the potential to utterly destroy vast swathes of existing government blight and perhaps even keep it from regenerating. A bit. Maybe. Even a dynamo like Elon will probably find that there’s just too much to tackle in one presidential term.

The butt hurt Democrats are beginning to parse things trying to minimize them. You heard how it works when Martha Raddatz told J.D. Vance after he mentioned that TdA gangs had taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado. She said, “The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes …” as if the people in those complexes should grin and bear it because it just isn’t that bad.

Democrats have tried this when illegal aliens commit murders. They will trot out numbers that “prove’ American citizens are far more violent and it’s just a few murders anyway — as if the murders of innocents like Laken Riley are a statistic rather than a completely avoidable tragedy.

There are ludicrous people claiming that millions being sent abroad to support DEI, transgender plays, or to teach the Taliban how to be sensitive to women’s rights is just such a small number, it is OK – when, as in the Colorado gang situation, none of it should be happening.

The millions upon million that were sent to the left-wing media outlets that complied with the Democrats’ wishes to have hit pieces written about GOP candidates is harder to defend, but I’m sure some moron on MSNBC or CNN will find a way.

Here in Canada, of course, we’re much more familiar with the government of the day getting the kindest of treatment from the media … because the media get big subsidies from that very government, but at least it’s somewhat out in the open. US media may have been similarly subsidized, but until now it had been completely obscured.

Some people legitimately need help, and I am sure there are programs that do have a benefit to America, but this is the Democrats’ fault because the only way I see to fix it is to burn it all down and start over with an ironclad approval and review process. Every one of these alleged aid agencies should be required to produce an annual report for public view the same way legitimate private charities do.

And the quicker we strike the match, the faster this gets fixed.”

On Substack, Francis Turner points out that we’re only into the third week of the Trumptastrophe, and it’s glorious:

We’re in the third week of the political tsunami that is Trump 2.0. The DOGE boys are getting access to systems and turning off the money flows and the DC swamp creatures are panicking. I think they may be mistaking what happens now for about as bad as it can get, while actually what we have now is that moment when the sea retreats abruptly from the beach and poor widdle crabs and fishies are left flapping in pools that are too small for them. Although the FBI agents and DoJ persecutors prosecutors who were involved in the Jan 6 investigations and the Jack Smith fishing investigations are probably feeling the wave coming down on them. In particular I would very much not want to be the agent who pawed through Melania’s underwear.

Right now the lacka money, lacka graft and lacka future employment seems bad, and that may be all some of the bottom feeders experience, but in the weeks ahead we’re going to see just what the federal government was spending all that money on and just who was benefiting and what they were doing. People with nice modern automobiles, large houses and so on may be required to explain where the money for those possessions came from. That’s going to lead to prosecutions and, well, as Trump and the Jan 6 guys know the process is part of the punishment. Moreover, since the graft flow will have stopped, paying for defense lawyers etc. is going to be interesting. In particular it’s going to be really interesting because the big firms that might normally step up and offer pro bono support are likely to find the requests for support overwhelming and, simultaneously, their regular income from paying clients drastically reduced.

Well shucks

Mind you we have a while before that wave comes crashing down so it’s worth noting what we have learned so far.

The first is that Trump 2.0 is uninterested in slowing down. As I said in my previous post, DOGE are working 24×7 while the swamp is used to 9-5, Monday to Friday. With generous time for lunch etc. That means Trump/DOGE can (and have) got inside the OODA loop of the enemy. We can see this by how protests about DOGE actions are a couple of days after the action has happened. Moreover we see Trump people saying things like “yes we need to look at the Department of Education” which causes talking heads to rush to its defense. This is quite possibly a ruse and deliberate distraction.

February 6, 2025

The fascinating (domestic and) transnational role of USAID

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the most interesting moves of the Trump administration so far has been the lightning strike to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID):

On closing it down Musk said: “USAID is a criminal organisation. Time for it to die.”

On Friday last week, Elon Musk and DOGE wanted access to agency systems of the giant USAID. When senior officials refused, by Saturday they were put on leave.

    “Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.

    “It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in,” Musk said in a live session on X Spaces early Monday. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.” — AP News

Elon Musk and DOGE closed the doors, and sent the head honchos packing. One officeworker said staff rushed to take down things like Pride Flags and incriminating books (whatever that means), and now they have lost access to their computers, and the site is down.

As Donald Trump and Elon Musk cut back rogue government agencies, USAID looks more and more like a giant money laundering racket. It has (or had) 10,000 employees and a budget of $50 billion dollars. It’s presented as a humanitarian aid group, but the AID in US-AID means the US Agency for International Development which turns out to mean anything and everything. The humanitarian projects include giving $53 million dollars to the starving EcoHealth Alliance which used that to pay for bioweapon research in Wuhan, China, helping to create Covid-19. USAID also funded the production of heroin in Afghanistan. The WhiteHouse revealed that USAID also funded DEI projects in Serbia, and DEI musicals in Ireland. They spent US Taxpayer money on transgender operas in Colombia and a trans comic book in Peru.

As Mike Benz describes it, USAID was the Ultimate Nerve Center Of A Rogue Foreign Policy Establishment

Mike Benz, former State Department Cyber expert, has studied USAID closely and says:

    USAID grantee NGOs literally take their USAID money then turn around and lobby all key members of Congress to give more and more US taxpayer money to USAID each year in the budget. USAID buys an army of lobbyists with your tax dollars to give it more of your money.

He also wonders why USAID gave $27 million to the US fiscal sponsor of the group controlling Soros-funded prosecutors and telling them which American citizens and politicians to prosecute?

Indeed, somehow USAID is also one of the “BBC Media Actions” top ten donors? Go figure? It’s just the US of A helping out third world countries like the UK, right?

    As Mike Benz said: the “BBC was in direct cahoots with USAID leadership on Internet censorship efforts to crush BBC’s online populist news competitors since 2017. I went over 9 hours of receipts on this in a 3-part private livestream lecture for my X subscribers”.

The BBC part of The Blob takes Blob money to lobby to cripple the media outside The Blob’s control. The words “Self Serving” come to mind.

Ron Paul agrees — USAID is a key component of US Regime change, meddling in foreign affairs. The news from Ukraine is essentially being controlled by USAID. Ukrainian media is Blob media.

Jo Nova posted a follow-up the next day:

Hands up who is still reeling with the news that USAID had 50 thousand million dollars of political and media influence? The annual budget of $50 billion dollars in the hands of unaccountable activist NGOs buys a lot of “journalists”, editors and teenage protestors. Suddenly a lot of global patterns make more sense.

Today we found out that news outlets like Politico, and the New York Times were being given millions of dollars from the US government.

Benny Johnson says:

    This is the biggest scandal in news media history: No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis. Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.

It seems some $27 million dollars went to Politico during the Biden years — and that’s just the subscriptions (not the USAID). Truly, Politico charges as much as $10,000 for a single “Politico Pro” subscription — and so the taxpayers fork out big bucks to pay for politicians “work expenses”, and the money ends up covering the salaries of journalists who are working hard to deceive the hapless taxpayers.

As ZeroHedge reminds us, Politico went in hard in the 2020 election to cover for the Hunter Biden laptop from hell.

They also point out that the Blob has many other ways to keep newspapers toeing the line…

    It’s not just the subscriptions: there are huge “ad contracts”, dinner parties DC throws itself under the guise of “media conferences”, sponsorships, etc all paid for by taxpayers. Once done with Politico look at its spawn Axios, founded by Politico veterans

Niccolo Soldo included some commentary on the USAID shutdown in his weekend post a few days back:

Today I learned that all NGOs working in foreign countries that are funded by the USGov are having their funding suspended for 90 days. This is already sending shock waves around the world, as not only are State Department officials losing their shit, but local NGO employees are wondering how they can continue operating in the meantime:

People are quickly learning just how much of a footprint the USA has in their countries and how significant an influence they have on politics in their homelands. All of their Trojan horses are being exposed at the same time, meaning that it will take some time for most people to digest the sheer scale and size of US meddling abroad.

Mainstream media is already beginning to push back against this funding suspension, using their typical tricks to try and paint this order as potentially “risking the safety of millions“:

    Marocco strode into the offices of USAid this week flanked by members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency”, a special group Trump created, with clipboards in hand. Several hours later, almost 60 senior officials from the office had been put on paid leave. Veteran aid officials with decades of experience at the agency were escorted from the building by security, according to current and former USAid officials, and their email accounts were frozen.

    “They wanted to decapitate the organisation,” said a current USAid employee. “And they did it by pushing aside the leadership and decades of experience.”

    The purge followed confusion within USAid over the stop-work orders drafted by Marocco and signed by Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, leading some to believe that limited actions could continue if funds had already been committed.

The Guardian UK has decided to focus its attacks on Mr. Marocco.

    “We have identified several actions within USAid that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people,” wrote Jason Gray, USAid’s acting administrator, saying the relevant staff would be put on administrative leave.

    Some employees have openly rebelled. In an email to all staff seen by the Guardian, Nicholas Gottlieb, USAid’s director of employee and labor relations, said that appointees at USAid and “Doge” had “instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices”.

    Calling the requests “illegal”, Gottlieb said he “will not be a party to a violation of [due process]”. Hours later, he was put on administrative leave.

    In a separate email to the sidelined USAid senior staff, Gottlieb wrote that the “materials show no evidence that you engaged in misconduct”.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

    The chaotic rollout of the ban has led to whiplash for critical programs around the world, from emergency Aids relief (which has been granted a waiver), to clean-water and sanitation programs, to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which the Washington Post reported on Friday had gone offline.

    Yet there are few details of a vast review program, which is supposed to evaluate thousands of foreign aid grants as well as an expected torrent of waiver requests. And a number of the senior USAid staff put on administrative leave were lawyers who had helped prepare requests for exemptions from the foreign aid freeze, sources said.

Demoralization:

    Previous cables indicated that the people involved would include Marocco or the new director of policy planning, Michael Anton, another political appointee. The state department declined to answer questions from the Guardian about who is evaluating the reviews and how many staff had been detailed to the process.

    “We’re all trying to figure out, is there a review process? Who’s part of that review?” said the former senior USAid official. “Is it Pete Marocco and his two best friends?”

    At USAid, other directives have been enacted that have both defunded and demoralised staff. Photographs of aid programs around the world have been literally stripped off the walls after a “directive has been issued to remove all artwork and photographs from the offices and common spaces across all buildings”.

    Musk’s “efficiency department” has crowed about slashing $45m in scholarships for students from authoritarian Burma.

    The $40bn a year that the US spends on foreign aid is less than 1% of its budget. But the US spends $4 out of every $10 spent globally on humanitarian aid, according to the state department, and the sudden cutoff has led to thousands of layoffs among US contractors and local partners around the world.

And of course:

    A former USAid official said the decisions could put millions of people around the world at risk.

    “If there’s a tropical cyclone that hits Cox’s Bazar tomorrow, then how are you going to save all those people, and then how are you going to rebuild if there’s a stop-work order?” said a former senior USAid official, referring to the city in Bangladesh where more than 1 million Rohingya refugees are living. “You could have people sitting there for 90 days and sitting and waiting for what? That’s what worries more.”

Critics who say that this order effectively reduces US influence abroad are absolutely correct … but what if this is part of a widely-assumed fundamental change in how the USA conducts its foreign policy?

Seen on the social media network formerly known as Twitter:

February 1, 2025

DOGE’s first week

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.D. Tuccille on the odd position DOGE finds itself in, as many Americans seem conflicted about cutting back the federal government:

The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is off to a quick start, if we consider the advisory board’s claimed savings in federal spending and the voluntary buyout of workers that could reduce the ranks of federal employees with a minimum of drama. But while the public agrees that corruption, inefficiency, and red tape are serious problems for the government, DOGE itself enjoys mixed popularity and majorities believe the government spends too little on big-ticket items, leaving little room for savings. The American people themselves are a big obstacle to paring the federal government to size.

DOGE Off to a Good Start

“DOGE is saving the Federal Government approx. $1 billion/day, mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations, all consistent with the President’s Executive Orders,” the DOGE X feed boasted this week. “A good start, though this number needs to increase to > $3 billion/day.”

The Trump administration also sent a letter to the majority of the federal government’s roughly three million workers, offering a “deferred resignation” plan. Those who accept the deal could stop working for the government as of February 6 and still be paid through September of this year. The administration expects up to 10 percent of workers to take the offer. The voluntary nature of the plan blunts inevitable complaints from unions about “purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants”.

We will have to see what the results will be in the coming months and years. But if that works out, it’s a pretty good launch for an administration and its advisory board that are less than two weeks old. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t sure where they stand on all this.

The Public Frets About Corruption, Inefficiency, and Red Tape …

According to AP-NORC polling, majorities believe that corruption (70 percent), inefficiency (65 percent), and red tape such as regulations and bureaucracy (59 percent) are “major problems within the federal government.” These findings square with the results of other surveys revealing that “nearly 2/3 of Americans fear that our government is run by corrupt officials” (Babbie Centre at Chapman University, Spring 2024), that 56 percent of Americans say government is “almost always wasteful and inefficient” (Pew Research, June 2024), and that “55% of Americans say the government is doing too much” (Gallup, November 2024). That’s exactly what the Trump administration created DOGE to combat, so it should be a good sign for the project.

But Americans are torn over DOGE. Asked by AP-NORC to share their opinions of “an advisory body on government efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy” (before Ramaswamy left to run for office), only 29 percent support the venture while 39 percent oppose it. That seems to reflect its leadership. Fifty-two percent of those polled have an unfavorable opinion of tech titan Musk, while 36 percent view him favorably.

Why the hate? Musk’s problem may be that he’s a high-profile rich guy with things to say at a time when that type of person isn’t especially popular. Sixty percent of respondents believe it would be a bad thing “if the president relies on billionaires for advice about government policy”. That disapproval crosses over into opinions about DOGE, even if people say they support its goals.

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