Comment by russdill
8 days ago
Part of this is a crusade though. There's very much a desire to rip out anything that is considered "woke" or "DEI". But the rest of it is just burning things down for the sake of burning things down.
8 days ago
Part of this is a crusade though. There's very much a desire to rip out anything that is considered "woke" or "DEI". But the rest of it is just burning things down for the sake of burning things down.
I think the ripping out of woke stuff is mostly marketing for the political base. Sure, Trump and Musk have some personal stake in it too, but it's not the point.
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
They're getting rid of things that stand in Elon's way. CFPB was actively investigating complaints about Tesla and financing, for instance. It was also reportedly seen as a roadblock to turning Twitter into a payments platform.
Yeah, it is like the so called "Shock therapy" imposed on failing countries (like Russia in 1991 and some South american countries in the 2000s). The goal is to break down institutions so that more can be privatized.
Yeah and these guys are actually friends with Jeffery Sachs, who was the economist pushing for shock therapy in Russia in the 90s.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
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I think it's more Libertarian extremists feeding the public an excuse to execute the Libertarian dream of minimal government oversight
That's yet to be seen. Going for a limited government would require closing a lot of these agencies down, that requires congress.
If the fear of fascism raised by some is accurate, it seems more likely we'll see these agencies gutted and rebuilt as whatever the Trump administration wants them to be instead. No smaller government, just a different one.
"No smaller government, just a different one"
I live in D.C. and many of my neighbors are non-political civil servants of all kinds. All signs point to a dramatically smaller and weaker federal government without congressional action.
Whether these agencies that congress created and funded for decades will continue to exist in any meaningful way is de facto getting decided by congress right now.
The Vought/Musk group has fired 200,000 employees already, and is offloading real-estate as quickly as possible. That action is consistent with gutting, but not rebuilding, these agencies.
So congress either has to exercise its power over the executive to prevent this in the next few weeks, or the loss of capacity will have occurred and rebuilding will take many years and be dramatically more costly than maintenance would have been.
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> that requires congress
Elon is literally closing agencies like the CFPB and USAID down, in defiance of congress and the law. They are working under a legal theory that the president can do that, and are expecting their stacked supreme court to agree with them.
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Congress will only shut down these services if they don't perform. Musk is making sure they don't perform.
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I don't see why the supreme court couldn't rule a lot of these departments unconstitutional. The justification for many of them is flimsy at best, and seems to be to be in direct contradiction to the "only those rights specifically enumerated" deal.
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