Author Topic: DOGE: Elon & Vivek  (Read 1381 times)

Crafty_Dog

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DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« on: November 13, 2024, 02:39:13 PM »

Body-by-Guinness

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2.0?
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2024, 03:06:58 PM »
Perhaps the should release DOGECoin 2.0 and work out a way to tie it’s value to the amount of waste that gets discarded. I’d be in!

https://dogecoin.com/

Crafty_Dog

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FO: Vivek
« Reply #2 on: November 18, 2024, 09:32:43 AM »

Vivek Ramaswamy said federal contractors should expect “massive cuts” when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins working in 2025, promising “some agencies to be deleted outright.”

ccp

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Re: DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2024, 10:25:37 AM »
Vivek Ramaswamy said federal contractors should expect “massive cuts” when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins working in 2025, promising “some agencies to be deleted outright.”

don't these recommended cuts have to be reviewed and voted on by Congress?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« Reply #4 on: November 18, 2024, 06:38:19 PM »
Perhaps he is assuming the Congress will agree?
« Last Edit: November 19, 2024, 05:24:46 AM by Crafty_Dog »

DougMacG

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Re: DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2024, 07:56:56 PM »
Seems to me an executive branch department can spend less than what is authorized without further authorization from Congress.  Many things like eliminating departments, combining departments, even changing work rules may require acts of Congress.

No doubt the Left, even the elected right, will go nuts when they see $2 trillion in cuts.   )

Body-by-Guinness

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The Reduction Plan
« Reply #6 on: November 20, 2024, 09:19:49 PM »
I can hardly wait:

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government

Following the Supreme Court’s guidance, we’ll reverse a decades long executive power grab.

By Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

Wall Street Journal

November 20, 2024

Our nation was founded on the basic idea that the people we elect run the government. That isn’t how America functions today. Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This is antidemocratic and antithetical to the Founders’ vision. It imposes massive direct and indirect costs on taxpayers. Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.

President Trump has asked the two of us to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size. The entrenched and ever-growing bureaucracy represents an existential threat to our republic, and politicians have abetted it for too long. That’s why we’re doing things differently. We are entrepreneurs, not politicians. We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.

We are assisting the Trump transition team to identify and hire a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the justices held that agencies can’t impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), the court overturned the Chevron doctrine and held that federal courts should no longer defer to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law or their own rulemaking authority. Together, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

DOGE will work with legal experts embedded in government agencies, aided by advanced technology, to apply these rulings to federal regulations enacted by such agencies. DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission. This would liberate individuals and businesses from illicit regulations never passed by Congress and stimulate the U.S. economy.

When the president nullifies thousands of such regulations, critics will allege executive overreach. In fact, it will be correcting the executive overreach of thousands of regulations promulgated by administrative fiat that were never authorized by Congress. The president owes lawmaking deference to Congress, not to bureaucrats deep within federal agencies. The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront, but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.

A drastic reduction in federal regulations provides sound industrial logic for mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy. DOGE intends to work with embedded appointees in agencies to identify the minimum number of employees required at an agency for it to perform its constitutionally permissible and statutorily mandated functions. The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited. Employees whose positions are eliminated deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector. The president can use existing laws to give them incentives for early retirement and to make voluntary severance payments to facilitate a graceful exit.

Conventional wisdom holds that statutory civil-service protections stop the president or even his political appointees from firing federal workers. The purpose of these protections is to protect employees from political retaliation. But the statute allows for “reductions in force” that don’t target specific employees. The statute further empowers the president to “prescribe rules governing the competitive service.” That power is broad. Previous presidents have used it to amend the civil service rules by executive order, and the Supreme Court has held—in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021) that they weren’t constrained by the Administrative Procedures Act when they did so. With this authority, Mr. Trump can implement any number of “rules governing the competitive service” that would curtail administrative overgrowth, from large-scale firings to relocation of federal agencies out of the Washington area. Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.

Finally, we are focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers. Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question. But even without relying on that view, DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.

The federal government’s procurement process is also badly broken. Many federal contracts have gone unexamined for years. Large-scale audits conducted during a temporary suspension of payments would yield significant savings. The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent. Critics claim that we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which require Congress to shrink. But this deflects attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse that nearly all taxpayers wish to end—and that DOGE aims to address by identifying pinpoint executive actions that would result in immediate savings for taxpayers.

With a decisive electoral mandate and a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, DOGE has a historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government. We are prepared for the onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington. We expect to prevail. Now is the moment for decisive action. Our top goal for DOGE is to eliminate the need for its existence by July 4, 2026—the expiration date we have set for our project. There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.

https://x.com/rickydoggin/status/1859362612275970277?s=61

Body-by-Guinness

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Hewing the Overgrown
« Reply #7 on: November 22, 2024, 03:42:42 PM »
The math here has its scary elements:

How To Cut $2 Trillion Of Fat From The Federal Budget
"A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America."

QUOTH THE RAVEN
NOV 22, 2024
By David Stockman, Brownstone Institute

A goal of $2 trillion of budget savings is crucial to the very future of Constitutional democracy and capitalist prosperity in America. In fact, the soaring public debt is now so out of control that the Federal budget threatens to become a self-fueling financial doomsday machine. So more power to the DOGE of Musk and Ramaswamy. In spades!

For want of doubt, just recall this sequence. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 on a call to bring the nation’s inflationary budget under control, the public debt was $1 trillion.

By the time Donald Trump was elected the first time it had erupted to $20 trillion, which has now become $36 trillion. And under current built-in spending and tax policies it will hit $60 trillion by the end of the current 10-year budget window.

Thereafter, however, soaring interest expense will ignite a veritable fiscal wildfire. On paper, the public debt would power upward unabated to $150 trillion by mid-century under the CBO’s latest projection. Yet even the latter is based on a Rosy Scenario budget model that assumes Congress never again adopts a single new tax cut or spending program and that the US economy steams along without a recession, inflation recurrence, interest flare-up, or other economic crisis during the entirety of the next quarter-century!

Of course, long before the public debt actually hits $150 trillion or 166% of GDP per the CBO’s current long-term projection, the whole system would implode. Every remnant of America as we now know it would go down the tubes.

So we need to be clear that the team of Musk and Ramaswamy is talking about savings of $2 trillion per year and relatively soon, too. We make this clarification because we see the usual clueless commentators on Bubblevision saying, “Oh, they must be talking about $2 trillion over 10 years or at least a multi-year period of time.”

But we don’t think they meant that at all because Elon’s statement on the matter at the Madison Square Garden rally was very clear, and, quite frankly, if realized over 10 years or even 5 years it would be hardly worth the bother. That’s because the nation’s fiscal doomsday machine will be accumulating interest expense so fast as to make $2 trillion of savings spread over a decade little more than a rounding error. To wit, Federal interest expense has already passed the $1 trillion per year mark, which figure will hit $1.7 trillion by 2034 according to CBO and would top $7.5 trillion per year at minimum by our calculations by mid-century.

That is, if something drastic is not done now—like a $2 trillion annual budget savings soon—America will be paying more interest on the public debt within 25 years than the entirety of the Federal budget—Social Security, defense, Medicare, education, highways, interest, and the Washington Monument—today.

So, yes, Musk surely did mean $2 trillion per year in this interchange:

“How much do you think we can rip out of this wasted, $6.5 trillion (annual) Harris-Biden budget?” Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO and Trump’s transition team co-chair, asked Musk at the former president’s recent rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Without offering specifics, Musk said in response that he thinks “at least $2 trillion” in a brief moment that has since gained widespread attention online and drawn mixed reactions from budget world.

Obviously, the sprawling Federal government and its prodigious expanse of spending and debt literally defies easy comprehension and graspable solutions. After all, the current annual budget of $7 trillion amounts to Federal spending of nearly $20 billion per day and $830 million per hour. And when you talk about the 10-year budget outlook, comprehension literally fades away completely: The current CBO spending baseline for 2025-2034 amounts to $85 trillion or just shy of the annual GDP of the entire planet this year.


So based on experience we suggest building the $2 trillion case around a target year and several big buckets of savings by type. The latter can then be used to build a detailed but comprehensible plan for arraying and conveying the desperately needed house-cleaning of the Federal budget.

In that context, FY 2029 makes the most sense as a target year since it would represent the 4th and outgoing Trump budget; and also one which would give sufficient time for phasing in some of the sweeping cuts that will be needed, but not so far in the distant future as to be largely irrelevant to the here and now of fiscal governance during Donald Trump’s second term.

We’d also suggest three big buckets of savings, which we would short-hand as follows:

Slash the Fat…by eliminating unnecessary and wasteful agencies and bureaucrats wholesale.
Downsize the Muscle…by curtailing national security capacities and functions not needed for an America First policy.
Cut the Bone…by reducing low-priority entitlements and subsidies that the nation cannot afford, and which a reasonable view of societal equity does not require.
Needless to say, when it comes to the vast wasteland of the Federal budget there are innumerable ways to skin the cat. But based on our own experience of more than a half-century of familiarity with the Federal budget as both a participant and an informed observer, we judge the following mix to be the most plausible and balanced way to get to the $2 trillion of annual savings by FY 2029.

To be sure, even this relatively judicious mix is sure to ignite firestorms on the banks of the Potomac like never before, but it can be strongly justified and defended for the reasons we will lay out in several subsequent installments.

Slash the Fat: $300 billion or 15%.
Downsize the Muscle: $500 billion or 25%.
Cut the Bone: $1.2 trillion or 60%.
Suffice here to say that even the first bucket would leave them screaming to high heaven in the Swamplands of DC. But even that $300 billion savings could be accomplished only by eliminating entirely the estimated $50 billion annual cost of Biden’s misguided Green New Deal, including all EV credits and subsidies, and $150 billion per year of other forms of corporate welfare and subsidies embedded in the budget and tax code.

We will amplify the details of this $200 billion of inherent fat and waste in Part 2. But suffice it here to say that attacking the usual shock effect lists of outrageous studies, stupid foreign aid projects, or even payments to dead people, as is often used to illustrate wasteful spending, will get you barely a fractional decimal point of the savings target, as desirable as eliminating this nonsense might be in its own right.

For instance, the savings from eliminating “Dr. Fauci’s Monkey Business on NIH’s Monkey Island” from the list below would amount to just 0.002% of the $2 trillion target, while eliminating the “USAID Fund to Boost Egyptian Tourism” would save just o.0003% of the target.

Even some of the larger ideas of this sort, such as more timely elimination of dead people from the Social Security rolls, would not get you very far, either. That’s because 1.1 million Social Security recipients pass on their rewards each year, and departing beneficiaries would be receiving an average benefit currently of $1,907 per month. So one month of dead people on the rolls costs the not inconsiderable sum of $2.1 billion.

At the present time, however, that does not actually happen. The rolls are purged every month based on newly filed death certificates, and this encompasses the termination of payments to anyone who died during the month, including the last day. So the average duration on the rolls of Social Security decedents is 15 days, which computes to $1.050 billion of payments.

Thus, the average duration of dead people on the rolls might well be cut by two-thirds if the Musk and Ramaswamy team could come up with some more efficient software to monitor, report, recalculate last month’s benefits, and then terminate decedents. In turn, that means getting the dead people off Social Security 10 days faster would amount to a savings of $700 million per year or about 0.04% of the $2 trillion target. That is to say, there is undoubtedly room for efficiency improvements and elimination of outright waste and stupidity everywhere in the Federal budget, but it unfortunately adds up to rounding errors.

Stated differently, if it doesn’t “scream and bleed” politically it won’t likely make a dent in achieving the $2 trillion goal. There is just plain nothing antiseptic about slashing the Federal budget.

In this regard, it would take an average 47% cut in the current nondefense Federal headcounts of 1.343 million, including the elimination of a dozen or more agencies entirely, to achieve the balance of $100 billion of savings in the Slash the Fat category.

And that’s a comprehensive figure based on an average cost per Federal employee of $100,000 in pay per year plus $44,000 in average benefits and fringes—escalated to $160,000 per bureaucrat by FY 2029. In Part 2, we will lay out the most plausible and judicious route to the Slash the Fat category with respect to both $200 billion of corporate welfare and Green New Deal waste and $100 billion of excess nondefense payroll.

Then in Part 3, we will lay out how to cut $500 billion per year of unneeded muscle from the national security budget, followed by $1.2 trillion per year of bone from the entitlement and domestic welfare basket.

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/how-to-cut-2-trillion-of-fat-from?r=2k0c5&triedRedirect=true1`1`1


Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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Congressman McClintock
« Reply #10 on: November 27, 2024, 06:25:08 AM »
I have donated to Cong. McClintock's campaigns a couple of times:

===============================

In free-market capitalism, just say no to subsidies

Sellers will always accept them and raise their prices accordingly

By Rep. Tom McClintock

Free-market capitalism is the most democratic way to organize an economy. In a free market, consumers vote every day with every dollar they spend on what they want the economy to produce, who will produce it and what they’re willing to pay for it. The daily prices in this never-ending plebiscite also convey vast information regarding every product, including the scarcity or abundance of the resources in it, the labor conditions that produced it and the systems that distributed it.

It is a perfect system that requires only that government protect the freedom of a willing seller and a willing buyer to make an exchange according to their own best judgment. No force is required because both act in their own interest. The price signals of that simple exchange, multiplied infinitely every day, guide the labor and resources of an economy to their highest and best use, according to every person’s interests, needs and judgment.

Despite this, politicians love to interfere with this perfect mechanism through various tools designed to “direct” the economy — that is, to replace the judgment of individual consumers and producers with the judgment of politicians.

One of the most insidious and self-destructive ways they do this is by subsidizing the things they think consumers should buy to make those things more attractive. This stuffs the economy’s ballot box, diverting resources from their highest and best economic use for consumers to the highest and best political use for politicians. Worse, it corrupts the accurate price signals essential for consumers to make rational decisions over allocating their own resources and thus directing overall economic output.

Insurance, electric cars, mass transit, sugar, milk, solar panels, airline tickets, housing, tuition, health care, film production, green energy — it is hard to find a sector of the economy that isn’t rife with subsidies. Let’s not forget the infinite subsidies that saturate our tax code.

True, these subsidies make favored products cheaper, and who can begrudge cheaper health care, tuition or housing? But that’s an illusion.

The reality is that sellers will always accept subsidies by raising their prices accordingly. Those receiving the subsidies are somewhat better off, and everyone else is much worse. As subsidies artificially inflate prices, more subsidies are required to ameliorate their effect in a continuing spiral.

It’s no coincidence that prices in heavily subsidized sectors such as health care, housing and tuition are rising faster than the underlying inflation rate. Provide first-time homebuyers with a $25,000 subsidy, and sellers accept that windfall by raising their prices on the housing stock.

Subsidies cost hundreds of billions of dollars and inflate the prices of the things being subsidized. They also misallocate resources and misdirect consumer decisions.

Insurance, for example, is how markets assign a dollar value to risk. Building a house in a flood zone is risky, and high insurance premiums reflect that. Subsidized insurance rates invite people to take risks that high premiums would otherwise warn them against.

Accurate price signals are absolutely essential for consumers to make rational decisions as they vote every day on what the economy should produce and are just as essential for producers to know what consumer demands they most need to fulfill.

Subsidies are so deeply ingrained in the economy that getting rid of them all seems a fool’s errand. Every subsidy has a constituency — and the bigger the subsidy, the more powerful the constituency. But budget writers grappling with the largest federal debt in history and with an economy operating well below its potential should be looking for every way to reduce, eliminate or reform subsidies or substitute for them other mechanisms that can serve the same societal aims without doing so much damage.

So here is a modest proposal to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: To balance the budget and improve the economy, just say no to subsidies. Not only will that save hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it will reduce the overall cost of the things being subsidized and reinvigorate the economy by restoring the flow of capital to its most productive use.

Tom McClintock represents California’s 5th Con-gressional

District

Crafty_Dog

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FO" Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
« Reply #11 on: November 29, 2024, 08:44:08 AM »
We have discussed the CFPB here previously-- particularly in context of it being self-financing.  I did not understand SCOTUS's ruling that this did not violate Separation of Powers.

=======================


Elon Musk called for eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Vivek Ramaswamy said the “midnight-hour expenditures” and regulations the Biden administration is attempting to cement before President-elect Trump takes office will “get special scrutiny” from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). [According to Marc Andreessen in his recent interview, the CFPB, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and other agencies have heavily engaged in “administrative power” to de-bank tech executives, and exercise strong controls over the crypto and AI industries. It is likely major tech leaders who supported Trump will push to depower or eliminate the CFPB and reign in the SEC and CFTC. – R.C.]



DougMacG

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Re: Shitbird to the end, Biden blows off Elon & Vivek
« Reply #14 on: December 06, 2024, 06:02:09 AM »
"A Biden administration official just agreed to an updated contract with a powerful union that locks in telework through 2029"

 - I'm no legal expert but I say not worth the paper it's written on, current administration has no power to bind the government past Jan 20. Take it all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« Reply #15 on: December 06, 2024, 03:50:19 PM »
OTOH a contract is a contract.   Not clear to me how this plays out.

DougMacG

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DOGE has hit a nerve with the Left, unsurprisingly
« Reply #16 on: December 10, 2024, 06:58:45 AM »
Author argues this non-government entity with no direct authority is a non-government entity with no direct authority.

I ask, where in the constitution does it empower the federal government of today to spend 40% more than they are ake in putting massive financial burdens on citizens not born yet without their consent?
-----------------
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/12/09/musk-and-ramaswamys-doge-project-to-eviscertate-the-federal-government-is-a-legal-train-wreck/
« Last Edit: December 10, 2024, 08:43:30 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: DOGE: Elon & Vivek
« Reply #17 on: December 10, 2024, 08:44:43 AM »
Yes, debt is future taxes imposed without representation.